


Strange Times & Mr. Segundus

by Menolith



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Epistolary, Gen, Gross Violations of Mortality, It's Not Forbidden Knowledge If Your Brain Doesn't Melt, Magical Technobabble, Sesquipedalian Erudicity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2019-11-07 15:09:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 24,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17962907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Menolith/pseuds/Menolith
Summary: A man makes a pact with a sentient library. First it's just about finding books, but things escalate soon enough as he starts to unravel what is going on.One-shots, correspondence and vignettes from a long-running DND 5e campaign I've been a part of.





	1. Character Sheet

**Author's Note:**

> I'm running an INTlock using a slightly refluffed version of one of the patrons from [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/9ov388/genuine_cofsa_compendium_of_forgotten_secrets/) wonderful homebrew.

### Clark Segundus, the Archivist

#### Level 7 Human Archive Warlock

`STR: 8 (-1)`  
`DEX: 12 (+1)`  
`CON: 12 (+1)`  
`INT: 18 (+4)`  
`WIS: 13 (+1)`  
`CHA: 12 (+1)`

Proficiencies:

Arcana (Expertise) | Forgery Kit  
---|---  
History (Expertise) | Calligraphy Kit  
Investigation | Stealth  
Perception | Medicine  
  
* * *

#### Feats:

** Human Determination (+INT) **

** Keen Mind (+INT) **

* * *

#### Invocations:

**Eyes of the Rune Keeper**

You can read all writing.

**Eldritch Sight**

You can cast Detect Magic without expending a spell slot.

The enchantment in your eyes turned out to be too delicate for the amount of otherworldly power it was forced to process. After beholding the interstices of the worlds via a faulty portal and even catching a glimpse of the afterlife itself, the magic has become warped and left your conventionally blind. Fortunately, that is not a significant hindrance given the partially transcended nature of your current body, and the heightened sensitivity of your eyes now allows you to also see the magical currents around you. 

**Agonizing Blast**

Your Eldritch Blast hits deal extra damage equal to your Intellect modifier.

After cultivating deeper insights into the well of dimensional power stemming from the boundaries of the Archive, you become capable of controlling the tapped energy with less refinement. This chaotic nature of the power imbues the effect of the Eldritch Blasts with an agonizing psychic component as the projections retain some of the incomprehensible geometry of their source, and impose that onto the target's mind.

**Book of Ancient Secrets**

You learn two level 1 ritual spells. You can only cast them as rituals, but you also gain the ability to cast any of your known spells as a ritual. Additionally, you can add other ritual spells to your Book of Shadows should you encounter them, at the cost of 50gp per spell level. The spell's level must be equal to or less than half of your warlock level, rounded up.

* * *

#### Boons and Blessings:

**Eldritch Subsistence**

You no longer need to sleep nor eat. To gain the benefits of a long rest, you can spend all eight hours of doing light activity. You make Wisdom (Perception) rolls with a -5 penalty.

After being brought back from beyond the veil, your mind and body have shifted closer to something other. You can see things where there should be none, and your corporeal form no longer feels as attached to this world as it once was.


	2. Origin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sudden illness strikes his family, so Clark does the only thing reasonable: make a pact with an unholy library for healing magics. It all works out, promise.

Dibbler was dotting the I's of the latest paragraph of his report when he heard that Clark's quill had stilled. It was rare enough an occurrence that he glanced up from his paper to look at the human boy.

Well, 'boy.' He was an adult by now and one frighteningly proficient at forgery, but with how long gnomes lived on average, it was hard for Dibbler not to think of him as a toddler.

"Hey Dim," Clark eventually spoke up in his habitually husky voice, "mind if I get a bit philosophical with you for a moment?"

"I don't swing that way and I do have a wife, thank you."

Clark snorted and shot him a crooked smile. "No, really though. Do you ever feel..." he trailed off with his brow creased, pausing for a moment. "Not sure how to even explain it now, really. You ever feel as if you are... limited. Constrained. As if there was just... more to this life," he said while vaguely gesturing around himself.

Dibbler looked around himself. They were in his cellar, far away from the prying eyes of law enforcement. The walls were old and the floor worn, the rest of the room filled with miscellanea which accumulates when one lives in the same place for two hundred years. Memories, good and bad, secreted away along with the items.

"I'm sure there is more to it," he started when he saw his old grappling hook hanging on a hat rack. "How many other houses in this town have rooms dedicated for illicit deals? I mean, if you just go out there and look for it, I'm certain you will find all sorts of things. I just don't care of it." He dipped his quill back into the inkwell before continuing, "and that is probably for the best."

Clark hummed noncommittally, lost in thought. When no reply was forthcoming, Dibbler spoke up again.

"I take it that you feel like that?"

Clark blew air through his nose and picked up the form he had been working on, inspecting it closely. "Well, yes. I mean no offense, but forging documents to embezzle fifteen point three kilograms of sausages feels just, well, _plain."_

Dibbler chuckled. "None taken. The retirement plan for my vocation is six to ten years of imprisonment under Imperial law. I'm very much happy cutting the corners where I can and keeping down low. You know, though, there's nothing holding you back. You could just walk out any time you wanted to do whatever doesn't feel 'plain'."

Clark sighed. "Yes, I'm aware. It just feels foolish. Run away to the wide world to do... what?" He punctuated something on the parchment with a tiny bit of force. "That's a recipe for disaster. No plan, no direction, no finances, nothing. That's a quick way to brigandage and permanent lodgings on Imperial dime. Not to mention my family and _everything_ being here." He huffed and stood up, holding the parchment in his hand. "Well, this is ready now. Ask for a receipt when you deliver it. Messler told me that the replacement magistrate might become a permanent one, and I want to have some samples from his office."

The gnome smiled, taking the form from Clark. "Thank you. Do you need another receipt for your payment for this?" he asked with a wink.

"Lords no, my office is tainted enough by your chicken scratches," Clark bemoaned as he packed up his things into the large box he usually carried. "Also, before I forget"—he never did—"mother said that she wanted to test a new Branwaldian blood sausage recipe she got her hands on. I trust that you'll reserve a few choice loops for her?"

"Why, yes, of course." Dibbler watched as Clark finished packing up and walked to the door. "Clark."

He stopped with his hand on the doorknob, looking at Dibbler.

"There's still time. Don't worry."

Clark looked at him with mild confusion on his face until he connected the dots to their earlier discussion and nodded. "Yeah, I suppose. See you next Monday at the latest." With that, he disappeared through the door.

* * *

"...outside of my area of expertise, I'm afraid."

Clark had frozen outside of his brother's room. He didn't want to intrude while the physician was inside.

He could hear his father roaring in response. "WHAT THE HELL DO WE PAY—" he stopped, and continued with a more tempered voice, probably thanks to a wordless intervention from Mother, "pardon me, what do you mean you can't fix it."

Clark heard the physician sigh. "Sir, I mean no slight by this, but you pay me because you can afford me, and this is far beyond my abilities. The disease is thaumogenic in nature, and my training pertains to mundane ailments only."

"It is magical?" his mother asked.

"Yes, that much I can tell. I have not heard of anything like this, but do I know enough of the area to be confident about my diagnosis. There are stories of these types of illnesses appearing for no apparent reason, perhaps because of errant natural thaumic confluence. The good news I do have is that it should not be contagious."

"But—what can you do?" his brother spoke, voice tinged with something Clarke didn't recognize.

"I'm sorry, but not much. I can provide you a few names to reach out to, but that is mostly it." The physician paused for a moment. "I doubt they will be of much help. These sort of illnesses... they are curiosities. It's fairly likely that if there is a cure, it has to be created from scratch by someone with extensive knowledge of thaumobiotic medicine, and those people are few and far between. Unless you strike gold and find a person like that, I estimate three to six weeks until the disease becomes terminal."

A silence fell with the words lingering heavily in the air, each family member trying to digest them.

"I—could I have a moment," Norrell said, voice thick.

"Yes, of course. We'll talk to Dr. Morris in the main hall," his father hurriedly said.

Clark stared at them dumbly as they pushed past him in the hallway, Arabella nodding as they passed. Clark lurched forwards and opened the door to his brother's room, seeing him sitting up on his bed with a dead stare. Clark just stood there, not sure what to do.

It had all been so sudden. One week, Norrell was being his loud self, and next he's bedridden with lethargy and a mysterious disease. He had _considered_ the possibility of it being fatal, but he had never entertained it as a serious possibility. Standing there in their childhood room with the inevitability of death looming over them was just surreal. It was as if he was going to wake up at any moment.

"You heard the man?" Norrell asked hoarsely which snapped Clarke out of his stupor.

"Yeah."

"I..." Norrel started, not managing to finish the sentence as tears started glistening on his eyes.

Clark stumbled forward, grasping him in a tight hug, feeling his brother grab onto him.

"I don't want to die," Norrell managed with his voice wavering.

Clark bit his lip, his face set in a grimace. He wanted to say that they'd message the experts, call in favors, figure something out and get the cure. That it was going to be fine.

But that would have been a lie. What good would pretending do? They both knew just as well that the situation was grim. What was there for him to say?

"Yeah," he belatedly replied.

* * *

Clark huffed, straightening the piece of paper in front of him in the silence of the library. On the paper was a simplistic diagram of concentric geometric shapes. It was flawlessly rendered, the different parts double-checked from numerous books of magic. He stared at it, taking in the form he had so meticulously constructed. It all made sense to him; the mana boundary, the gradient afference, the auric trigger—every piece of the puzzle added up. He had built a machine out of ink, and nature would have no other option but obey his will and twist itself into a flame.

He breathed deeply and placed his hand on the diagram, steadying himself. He recited the relevant passage from _Basics of Thaumaturgy_ out of memory, and took the final step. He willed his mind to trigger the construct, hand pressing forcefully onto the paper as he poured every ounce of his willpower into it.

Nothing happened.

Clark ripped his hand from the paper, letting out a long, frustrated grunt and grabbed the _Basics of Thaumaturgy,_ slamming it shut and off the table, the sounds of his anger echoing in the silence. The librarian—miss Honeyfoot, bless her soul—didn't intervene. She knew what he was going through. Clark slumped on his chair, hearing the echoes of his outburst die out. It was useless. The magic just did not work. There was no reason why it shouldn't. After all, the potential for magic was inherent for all living things, but it just _did not work._ He buried his head in his hands, ignoring his stomach growling. He was too busy being useless at everything to eat. What sort of magical initiate fails at fucking _prestidigitation?_

The so-called expert who had arrived to look at Norrell for no insignificant cost had been of no use, and after questioning him exhaustively, he just seemed to have a clue what the illness was. All the Segunduses got was shrugs, maybes and a family ledger dipping into the red. Fucking quack.

Clark swallowed and sat up, looking at the diagram again. Norrell was running out of time. They simply did not have the money to teleport in a savant from one of the big academies who could actually conceivably do anything about the disease. Clark had had some heated words with Dibbler about it which he now regretted. The old gnome was right, moving that much money illegally was suicide, especially in a town this tiny. The only avenue left was for Clark to study the disease himself, which would require magical aptitude. It was vanishingly likely that Clarke would be able to do anything in the time he had left. Norrell was already losing lucidity, and the quack had guessed that he'd die in a few weeks after falling into a permanent coma.

What options did he have, though? 'Vanishingly likely' was infinitely better than doing nothing. He sighed deeply, getting up. No use in dwelling in it. _Basics of Thaumaturgy_ was rubbish anyway. He thought he had seen a relevant volume in the magic-section of the library. Maybe he could cross-reference it and see if the topology of the diagrams matched.

He was so lost in thought that it took her a while to realize that the timid quiet of the town library had subtly shifted to an oppressive silence which was bearing on him. The bookshelves near him weren't just old, they were _old,_ decades of patina coating them and large, varied books filling them to the brim. He was no longer in the town library. He whirled around in confusion, seeing foreign rows of bookshelves continuing far beyond what the building's floor plan should allow. Bewildered, he trailed his fingers across a volume and took it out of the shelf. It was written in a foreign language with the pages filled with illustrations of half-constructed boats.

He was entirely lost, mentally and physically. None of this made sense, and the atmosphere was bearing down on him like a suffocating blanket. He started walking back where he had come from, but the twisting corridor didn't go the way he thought he had travelled which made him panic. His mind was reeling, and he leaned against the bookshelf. This was not a dream. He remembered precisely where he had been two minutes ago, and he wasn't falling asleep while walking. Was he going insane?

The dark train of thought was interrupted when his eyes met an unassuming book in front of him, bearing a medical symbol. With a trembling hand, he picked it up and leafed through it.

It was useless as far as he could tell. Basic instructions on triage in what seemed to be Dwarven script, but it made something click in his head. He looked forwards and backwards, the myriad of books stretching in every direction.

This, whatever it all was, was a sign. Very magical, and _very_ blatant. He had just been bemoaning the lack of information, and suddenly he finds himself in an obviously magical library filled with nothing but information. Maybe it was dumb luck. Maybe it was Fate, maybe something else, but right here and now, he'd take any of those. He snapped the book closed and put it back into the shelf, turning towards where he had come from. _T for Thaumobiotic._

* * *

Clark stumbled through the doors of his home. Had they always looked that weathered? The paint was starting to crack at the bottom right corner. Now that he thought of it, wasn't it weird how the carpenter had used a dovetail chamfer on the inner side? Lark's tongue was the customary one for an Eastern settlement like theirs. He hadn't thought of that before.

Arabella greeted her as if nothing had happened. He waved at her and scampered upstairs with a heavy green volume in tow, entering his brother's room.

Norrell was laying on the bed, his gaunt form stirring awake.

"Hey bro, what is do are you to," he slurred, eyes blearily focusing on him which made Clark's heart twinge.

"It's alright, Norrell, I was on an errand." Speaking felt weird, and he shuddered at the volume. The reply he got was incoherent, and he unceremoniously knelt in front of him to better see Norrell. He hiked Norrell's shirt up, grimacing at the angry red-blue circle at his side. For a moment, he paused. Could he do it? What if it went wrong?

He shook his head, dispelling the doubts. It didn't matter. Norrell would either live a long life or die because of Clark's inability. An attempt was the best he could give. He flipped over the dusky tome he had brought despite having memorized the entire chapter by now. He slid his fingers over the now-familiar diagrams, feeling latent power sizzling just beneath reality.

He didn't know how long it had taken. Days, hours, weeks; it all melded together in that place. What he did know was that eventually he had found this volume which depicted the same symptoms of whatever it was that Norrell had. He recalculated the input matrices in his head for the thousandth time and let the power well in his fingertips. How had this been difficult before? Now it was almost a challenge to keep the mana from taking shape. He wove it into the constructs the book portrayed, trailing the lines confidently as the complex formula unfolded in his mind's eye.

He hovered his other hand close to the bruised circle. Yes, it seemed similar to what the book spoke of. He could sense the faintest bit of resistance along with an ethereal flow of sorts. The canker was a parasitic magical construct feeding on his brother's life force. That in and of itself may have been livable with some difficulty, but the canker was using the energy to grow itself which would eventually become lethal. The autonomous conversion of energy the canker did was also a very lossy one which basically inflicted Norrell with thaumic irradiation syndrome which was the source of the visible symptoms. The book didn't go into detail about how these cankers were created and it didn't tell how to outright cure it, but it did provide a method to stall the effects indefinitely. The canker could not be removed, but it could be strangled. The principle was relatively simple; the primary function of the curing spell was to harshly limit the amount of life force the canker could absorb, and the secondary function was to convert the remainder into simple heat to starve the disease of the energy it needed to grow. The solution was not permanent or perfect and would require maintenance, but he'd live like normal.

He finished conjuring the formula and held it for a moment.

"Whaa—" Norrell slurred, having realized that something weird was going on.

"Just be still, okay?" Clark reassured him. He met his brother's eyes and initiated the process of transposing the spell onto the canker. "It's going to be fine."

* * *

Clark drifted to wakefulness as Norrell groaned. Clark immediately shook himself awake, looking at Norrell. Full recovery would be slow, but if there were going to be any improvements, he would have to see them now.

"Urgh, I, Clark, why are you here," he groaned, sitting up and holding his head. "Gods above, I feel like I'm gonna puke. I fucking swear if Dad tried some herbal remedies agai..." he trailed off, blinking slowly and looking first at his hands, then Clark's grinning face in confusion. "Clark, the fuck did you guys do?"

Clark's grin spread to split his face, and he snapped his fingers, conjuring a small glowing orb above his hand. "You really thought I'd leave you to rot like that, didn't you?" he said, barely holding back his elation.

Norrell stared at the floating orb dumbfounded. "Clark, what did—what did you do?!" he all but shouted in excitement as he stumbled on his feet.

Clark's smile grew to outright laugh when he drew his brother into an embrace, keeping him upright. He could feel tears prickling at his eyes when giggles started bubbling from Norrell, and he heard someone stomping up the stairs.


	3. Letter 1: Death on Arrival

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First of the letters Clark sends to Norrell.

Res. Norrell W. Segundus

Advent Lane 16

Branbourne City

Kolgath Province

_3th of April, 982_

Dear Norrell,

I hope my letter finds you in good health. Should that not be the case, for your own sake I really hope that any deviation from that is due to errant sphinxes or whatnot instead of you ignoring the _numerous_ and _thorough_ instructions I've given you on how to care for the seal that keeps you alive. Seriously, just because it's inert doesn't mean the canker is gone.

The usual complaints aside, I do hope you're doing well. I've had a taste of the adventuring life here on the Briths, and it's given me a fresh respect for the stuff you do. In particular, there's one event that I really would like your expertise on.

I trust you remember my two companions? Solomon, the old fart full of spit and vinegar, and Caliban, the airheaded mage I thought might suffer from a drug withdrawal? Well, a few weeks ago, we ran into a bunch of basilisks. Runts, the lot of them, but they caught us off-guard and the fight was vicious. Eventually, we managed to beat down the last of them, but not without taking heavy injuries. I'm fine myself, just got a few nasty bites, and Solomon took the hits like the old tarstump he is—that, by the way, is a fascinating word I encountered in a local Wanderlust settlement here. It means "hardy and extremely stubborn" which I sincerely think we should adopt to the greater Common lexicon—but even if we made it out of it fine, Caliban wasn't as lucky.

He died. Too many bites to stay standing, and too many ravenous beasts on top of him paired with a small stroke of bad luck made sure of that. I knew that death was always a possibility, though likely less for myself and more so for the others, but still, it's hard to come to terms with that. I keep thinking of the what-ifs, whether or not I should've spent more time researching what we were getting into, if I could've used my limited spells better, if there was a better position I could've maneuvered into, if we should have legged it earlier. So on.

While returning from that expedition, successful in every other way, Caliban interrupted the somber quiet by hacking out a cough on the makeshift hearse. Just like that, snap and he's sitting up, mostly cognizant and coughing up a small cloud of dust. Capable of speech, too, and seemingly no worse for wear than the rest of us, sans a curious case of partial petrification of his lungs which causes rather mild respiratory issues.

He was dead. Now he is not. I am almost certain that neither of these claims is incorrect. He had had no pulse. His aura was gone, and everything I could sense told me that he was as dead as the pile of reptilian bits next to him. I'm not unversed in the matters of death. In fact, had I not been fortunate enough to discover the book which detailed how to construct the seal you bear, my only option for curing you would have been to kill you. Non-lethally, of course. Your canker lives off your life fore, and the only way I had to get rid of it was to place you in a highly dangerous cryptobiotic state, essentially making you dead in all ways that matter, but just so very barely alive that restoration would be technically a matter of revival rather than resurrection. Deprived of the life force that feeds it, I hoped that the canker would waste away before you did. Needless to say, the seal solution is much preferred.

But I digress, my point is that I know what death is supposed to look like. That was it, yet Caliban persists living like the oddity he is. Have heard of anything like this? My sources have resulted in little but raised eyebrows and vague statements, so perhaps someone on the main continent knows better.

I have ruled out divine intervention out of habit. The absurd rarity of such an event aside, I felt no traces of meddling of the divine kind. So, barring true resurrection, my primary avenue of research is some sort of catalepsy brought forth by the petrifying poison. It's conceivable that my observations were incorrect due to the magical interference of the toxins, though it bothers me greatly if I missed something what I feel should've been so obvious. Admittedly, that would bother me less than witnessing true resurrection happen with no apparent rhyme or reason to someone so close to me, and to someone whom I know surprisingly little of.

On topic of Caliban's abnormalities, his personality is unchanged as far as I can tell, idiosyncrasies and all. While diagnosing him post-revival, my recently discovered Identify ritual resulted in some... curious developments. I mentioned the strange reaction he had to the wards of the local wizard, but I wrote that off as an inconsequential oddity, perhaps some interthaumic reaction to the innate magic he has as a sorcerer. However, my Identify provided the most curious results. He's not magically sickly as far as I can tell, but the feedback the spell gave me was, in a manner I cannot adequately explain, off. As if there was some sort of static to him which the spell picked up. I cannot say that I've had the pleasure of inspecting a great many sorcerers, much less with the aid of a rather expensive and involved diagnostics ritual, but that struck me as something stranger than just his own intrinsic magic. And this is coming from a person who's soulbound to an extradimensional library which will kill you in unimaginable ways for sneezing, so my standards for "strange" are fairly loose to begin with.

Caliban himself seemed to be wholly unaware of anything. I questioned him on the subject, but he seems to be as lost as I am on the subject. That, or he's being tight-lipped about it. I can't shake the feeling that there's something there that he's not telling us, either knowingly or otherwise. I've let it be for the time being, but the more I dwell on it, the more I feel like there's something dangerous going on. Perhaps it's paranoia, but again, I'm soulbound to a place of horrific power so I feel like I'm allowed to look at shadows with a touch more suspicion than is appropriate for a layman.

Oh, and not only that, but a few weeks later he also seemed to have a prophetic dream. Details are sparse—which is far from unheard of as far as these things go—and the only concrete things in it were a flash flood taking our camp as well as a red moon with a vertical line of three stars above and below it. See the illustration on the back of the letter. I'd appreciate any insight on that. I could write it off as a non-sequitor, if for no other reason but to avoid getting knee-deep in divination, but the ominous flash flood involved in the dream makes me wary. It's very clearly a negative sign, and I don't need to consult an auspex to tell me that. Ignoring a portent like that sounds like a horrible idea to me. The Archive has proved to be of limited use on that topic, as while I did manage to locate a tome which may provide answers, it's written in Giant and for giants. That is, it's in a language virtually nobody outside of the isolationalist glorified ogres over at Titanomachy understand, and the tome itself is hewn from a slab of marble which is big enough to serve as a door. Just moving it without attracting the ire of the Silent One is hard enough, and I'd rather not try my luck in that regard if other avenues prove adequate.

Interestingly, the language barrier may be the lesser obstacle to overcome. I won't get into details here, but I believe that I have figured out a way of interpreting text semiotically rather than contextually. I haven't had the time to pen out the details of the ritual, but unless I'm missing something crucial, it would allow me to comprehend the literal meaning of any written or spoken word. The ability would be invaluable to any scholar, and I also happen to be one who routinely runs into topics written in languages no living human has understood in centuries. I hesitate to call it a breakthrough yet as I have only words on paper to show for it, but should it prove successful, it certainly would be a breakthrough. The possibilities are staggering.

Apologies, but I'll have to cut this short. I'm visiting a Wanderlust settlement—it is as fascinating as it is eerie, and the thought of an affliction like that driving regular people into the wilds regardless of creed or race is unnerving—but our ride out seems to be leaving. I may have the opportunity to supplement this letter before sending it off, but should that not happen, I assure you that I'm in good health and better spirits. There are dangers on these islands, but the potential is immense. I know I suggested Azagar's jungles for your next destination once you're finished with the desert, but the Briths seem to harbor more secrets than I ever anticipated.

Also, you lazy fuck, get the seal checked. Really. I don't trust that hedge witch you described earlier. Restoring the seal is simple, but not trivial. I'll see if I can figure out if I can send diagnostic spell formulae over paper to see if it's still in working order.

Yours truly, C. S. Segundus


	4. Light Reading

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark learns a language, or hundred.

Clark was lounging in the shade on top of an abandoned crate near the inn, consumed by a small, colorful book. Next to him was a half-empty mug and a corked bottle of apple cider. His thoughts drifted out of the book as he heard footsteps approaching, and he thought that the swagger in the step was familiar.

"There you are. I thought you'd make use of the room we pay for," Solomon said as he rounded the corner, his voice characteristically bombastic enough to send a twinge of discomfort through Clark. He had always been conscious of the concept of 'indoor voice,' but before grouping up with Solomon he really hadn't considered just how sensitive to it he'd becomes after having his soul intertwined to a magical library which would eat your petty existence for breakfast if you made too much noise inside. He pushed the feeling aside and waved at Solomon off-handedly, his eyes not leaving the paragraph he had been going over. He did pick up the bottle of cider, though, swishing it in Solomon's direction.

Solomon laughed and waved it off. "Thank you, but I'd rather neck myself than drink your sun-warmed cider." He sat down on a barrel next to him, fishing his own canteen from somewhere and taking a gulp. "Really though, I must say I'm impressed to find you outdoors. Especially in this heat."

Clark turned a page. "I spend enough time in dusty basements as-is. Not that I don't enjoy that, but father is insistent on the benefits of direct sunlight." He paused for a moment before continuing. "Though I also do see the benefit of not having a complexion which makes people think I'm a vampire."

Solomon snorted and put away his canteen. "I suppose that's one way of looking at it. What do you have there? It looks more... lively than your usual tomes."

"This is a collection of elven fairy tales," Clark said, tilting the book to show the cover. "I'm brushing up my Sylvan because I think it would be useful what with all the elven ruins around."

Solomon raised an eyebrow and leaned in to see the cover better. "Oh, that is in Sylvan. I didn't know you spoke it. Or that you liked fiction, for that matter."

Clark shot him a half-smile before turning back to the book. "It is, I don't, and I don't. The grammar and syntax in it are simple which is why I picked it. The stories themselves feel like run-of-the-mill mildly xenophobic drivel I'd expect from old-blood elven mythos." He sighed and let the book drop into his lap. "Frankly, the whole language is ludicrous. Their priests claim that the language was given to them by gods, and with that in mind I do not understand how they maintain that their deities are omnipotent and benevolent _and_ intelligent when they granted us a language with twenty-eight different noun cases. I've seen more coherent writing systems introduced to the world on lavatory walls."

"What did you expect? They're sylvacentric to the bone. Of course the elven way is the right one, and of course their language is the divinely granted one." Solomon huffed and brushed up invisible dust from his shoulder pad, sitting up a bit straighter. "Though I came here for a reason." Of course he did. Why he insisted on small talk that he couldn't care less about, Clark didn't know, but he nodded along anyway. "Cedric tipped me off. He got a word back from his contacts, and they confirmed that there is some sort of ruin northeast of here. We might want to go check it out."

Clark hummed and took a sip from his mug. "Good, good. I'm a bit preoccupied for the time being, so I'd prefer it if we could wait a day or two before leaving," he said and turned another page.

Solomon looked at him skeptically. "You are going to finish learning the language in two days?"

Clark sighed and let the book fall down in his lap. "It's not that. I started this as an afterthought, but I'm distracted." He drummed his fingers against the cover of the book. "I've barely read up on the grammar and vocabulary at all, but I still feel like I can glimpse some amount of meaning from the words and... I'm not sure why." He bit his lip, lost in thought. It was difficult to put to words, especially in terms that Solomon would be familiar with, given how starkly different their areas of expertise were.

"You see," he continued after gathering his thoughts for a bit, "I think there's more to this. A brain is an imperfect way of framing the world, a thought is an imperfect way of interpreting that worldview, a language is an imperfect way of representing that image, and the written word is an imperfect way of portraying that representation." He gestured vaguely on the book. "I feel like there is just more to the words than I see. You know how you're reading a limerick without getting it, and you just feel like there's something... more in there? That's how I feel now. I'm looking at the words, but it feels like they're brushing against a much more fundamental concept, something beyond just simple grammar."

Solomon hummed and gave him a thoughtful look which told him that he wasn't following at all.

Clark sighed. "It's a patron thing. Words are more than just ink on paper. They _mean_ things. I think I'll need some time to sort this out, and if I can't get even started, it's going to keep bothering me."

Solomon nodded. "I see. Waiting for a few more days isn't going to kill us, though Caliban is getting antsy." He stood up and put his canteen back into its holster on his belt. "Well, best of luck for your research. I'll be at the mess hall if you need me."

Clark nodded and waved him off. "Thank you. I'd like to say I don't need the luck, but I don't really even know where to start."

* * *

It had been a few weeks since then, and the feeling he got when trying to read between the lines of a book had gnawed a hole in his psyche. He was in his room, scribbling rapidly on a parchment. It hadn't been until the encounter with the rust monsters that he felt like he finally had enough pieces of the puzzle for them to click.

He paused for a short moment, his pen hovering over the paper as he plotted out the formulae in his mind, mentally pruning the dead-end approaches before continuing. The epistemological connection between the communicating _res cogitans_ was clear as a day, but he had trouble defining the exegetic sphere as such that it would work in special cases.

His brow furrowed as he ran out of options in his head, the pen falling down. The formula wouldn't cancel out. There were just too many variables to work with, too many inconsistencies and contradictions. And it would be even worse if the source material was obfuscated instead of falling within the precise boundaries of what the formula required. Although...

He turned on his chair, looking at the ceiling. What he was trying certainly wouldn't work with high-entropy text, not like this. But should it? Encrypted text was intentionally illegible. In every other case, there should be a thematic intention behind the text. If he actually succeeded in tapping into the noumenal source of the information—the actual meaning behind everything—he'd skip all forms of attempted obfuscation, but did he have to? With plain text, could he use the very reason any writing was done to his advantage. Writing was _supposed_ to be understood. Could he hook into that semiotic connection?

He leaned back down, scribbling a few marks on the paper to signify it as dead end and drew a new leaf. He tapped his pen briefly and started sketching a circle on the paper, his mind filling in the geometric details faster than his hand could follow.

* * *

He hadn't slept tonight, and didn't feel a pressing need either when he heard a knock on the door.

"Come in," he husked out while tracking down appendix 14-22, finding the paper neatly on top of the pile where it should have been.

Solomon opened the door, furrowing his brow and gingerly stepping in to avoid disturbing system of papers scattered on the floor. The room was filled with sketches and papers with obscure numbers and diagrams on them, but Solomon had seen enough of Clark to know that there was a method to it all. He didn't think that it was coincidence that there was a gap in the papers near the door where he could set his feet on. Clark himself was in the middle of it all, spinning around occasionally to check up on something one of the paper piles. His portable equipment case was wide open, bristling with tiny folding compartments and writing implements, and now that Solomon looked closer, he saw that the erratic diagrams on the floor seemed to flow from one piece of paper to the next, forming a large magical circuit with two fountain pens in the middle of it sticking up between the floorboards.

"Clark, are you alright?" he asked warily.

Clark nodded. "Yes, just perfect. I feel like I've done a breakthrough."

"That's mighty fine," he said while eyeing the chaos in the room. It was worse than usual. "I just wanted to remind you that we're going to be leaving in an hour."

Clark nodded again. "Yes, I'm aware." He gently placed the paper he was holding onto the floor, completing the circle with it. He took a deep breath and leaned forward on all fours, inspecting the circle. "Actually, could you slide that paper over there towards me so it completes the outer circuit," he said while pointing in the corner of the room.

Solomon glanced there and saw an errant piece of paper apart from the rest. "Sure thing," he said and stepped towards it.

"Also, do you have the healing draughts prepared for today?" Clark asked absent-mindedly and rotated one slip slightly.

"But of course," Solomon said and slid the paper in place. "Why?"

Clark didn't answer, and just stared at the two fountain pens pointing up from the floor. "Just in case," he eventually said and slammed his face down on them.

Solomon jumped, his hand flying to the dagger on his hip when he saw his friend impale his eyes on the pens. At the same time, there was an ethereal pulse going through the room, like a very distant explosion. The effect lit up the papers with a pale blue light and threw them up in the air while Clark straightened up wordlessly.

Solomon grimaced and looked at him dumb-founded. The pens were stuck in his eye sockets so deeply that they looked lethal, but Clark was just gritting his teeth without any bleeding. Slowly, Clark reached up and grasped the fountain pens, ripping them out and casting small arcs of ink off them in the process. His eyes were scrunched shut, and when he started blinking gingerly, they were seemingly uninjured.

"Seven hells Clark, what the fuck was that," Solomon growled and slammed his dagger back into its sheath, not having noticed that he had drawn it out slightly.

Clark rolled his eyes experimentally, looking from one wall to another. "Sorry about that," he said, still blinking rapidly, "I just needed to go and do it."

"Do what?" Solomon almost yelled, "stab your fucking eyes out!?"

Clark groaned and reached for a tattered blue book on the nightstand. "I didn't 'stab my eyes out,' it was a delicate and carefully—you know what," he huffed out, opening the book, "just look." He turned a few pages and started reading it out loud, a smile growing on his face with every word. It seemed to be a historian's analysis on a battle fought somewhere which Solomon had trouble following.

"I'm still waiting for an explanation," Solomon interrupted with some annoyance in his voice.

Clark snapped the book shut and tapped his finger on the cover. "This? Useless hogwash written by a moron who can't tell infantry from cavalry, but more importantly it's written in an ancient Sortic dialect which has half a dozen living speakers, of which I am not one." The smile grew to an outright grin, and he cracked his neck while walking carelessly over the assorted diagrams littering the floor. "You know how expensive translators are? I'm not going to have to bend myself backwards for those hacks anymore."

He reached Solomon and grasped his shoulder. "Now, I understand there's breakfast waiting." Solomon looked at him with a lukewarm look in his face, and just for a blink he thought he saw a series of glyphs circling Clark's dark-brown iris.


	5. Letter 2: Rats, Worms, Dragons and the End of the World

Res. Norrell W. Segundus

Advent Lane 16

Branbourne City

Kolgath Province

_7th of April, 982_

So, Norrell, I'm getting back to you sooner than I thought.

Things on the Briths... there's something afoot. I knew that from the start, more or less but... not like this. In my last letter, I mentioned the prophetic dream my companion had, and I did some research on the subject, and it's along the lines of what I expected.

It's bad.

Immanentize-the-Eschaton-bad.

I found a Goliath-make book regarding the subject, and while it was mostly written in their talechant and I cannot derive meaning from many of the euphemisms it uses, the message was clear enough. It claims that the planes go through cycles where the boundaries between them strengthen and weaken in turn. On this, the modern scholars agree, as even though such events occur over very long time periods, they are pervasive enough that there is supporting evidence accessible all over the world.

However, the book goes into more detail and describes some sort of powerful extradimentional entity called Nightwalker which supposedly preys on this world when the boundaries grow thin. The book does not explain what it would actually do should it invade, but the implication there is that the consequences would be so beyond measure that the details are irrelevant.

Luckily, the the book focuses more on the fact that such an event can be prevented. It vaguely describes a set of rituals with varying degrees of complexity which are intended to deter Nightwalker from entering. How these achieve it is beyond my understanding, as they were nonmagical in nature and were along the lines of "trial by combat." I find it unlikely that such showings would in any way affect Nightwalker negatively, as a being that powerful should care little about men waving sticks. It is possible that it is some sort of divine formula which keeps it at bay which is only catalyzed by these rituals—gods work in mysterious ways and all that, the pricks—or the rituals are intended to appease it.

Performing ancient rituals derived from a book I cannot fully interpret in the name of an apocalyptic pseudo-god I know nothing about does not sit easy with me. Yet, the peoples who used to perform these rituals were wiped out by the plague as far as anyone knows, and we might now be the only ones who even know of it. I have not heard as much as a whisper regarding anything like this before, and my means of acquiring information are, let's just say more thorough than most. Before the plague, there used to be a Goliath community on the northern island, and my hope is that they are both alive and capable of shedding light onto this. If the people responsible for keeping Nightwalker in check have been dead for centuries, I cannot say how much time there is left for the matter to be settled. I know it's a long shot, but if you know anything regarding this whole situation, I'm all ears.

In marginally better news, we also discovered a titanic rust monster (illustration 1) gorging on some sort of magical substance here. We encountered a mysterious crystal—and, ah right, you don't know about Lucan. It's been a busy week.

To recapitulate on that: my hypothesis on the structure of the Archive seemed to be correct. I found the book I was looking for, and it fit into the Archive shelves like a piece of a puzzle. After inserting the missing book, a phoenix chalice (2) appeared in the atrium and soon enough, while emptying a small crypt out of ghouls as a sign of goodwill, I found a depression on the wall which the chalice fit perfectly. This unlocked a secret door and led us to a small jewel pendant (3).

My breakthroughs left me somewhat disappointed, as they opened more questions than they answered. After some research, it turned out that the pendant is a bastardized phylactery of sorts. And I know you're frowning, stop it. We have it under control. Besides, "phylactery" isn't just a lich term. This is just a receptacle for a soul, and involves no acts of necromancy that would go against the law. That aside, the person inside is called Lucan Aubergine [whatever] who is an elven architect from before the plague. At first I was elated to have some clarification, but communing with him shows that he has extensive memory loss due to the long period of minimal awareness, and he could tell us very little of import. As far as we know, he seemed to be a rather unimportant person doing unimportant projects, and he's as baffled as we are regarding how he got in there. Currently, we are looking into trying to figure out if he can be restored or if we need to resort to euthanasia.

He perceives the world through a vague "smoke" as he describes it which shows him just wisps of presences. For some reason, he's drawn to Solomon who's clearer to him than I am, and he cannot see Caliban at all. What he can see, though, was that strange crystal I mentioned. It is magical in nature, that much I could tell, but that's everything I can tell about it. At least it's not a structured spell. He was strongly drawn to the crystal, and we decided to do a brief diversion into the local mine to find samples to hopefully learn more.

I dislike chasing vague trails with the Blood Moon in the horizon, and I would much rather relinquish Lucan and his plight to the local elves to get him out of our hands, but yet, I cannot.

Lucan came via the chalice, the chalice came via the book, and the book's location came from the Archive. It links back to that place, and by association, me. Whatever bound Lucan into that pendant is a part of the grand scheme behind the Archive, and I have to follow that line. Previously, the tasks on the Archive were more mental in nature—charting the structure, reorganizing the books, tracing patterns, finding knowledge—but now, I feel like I'm fumbling blindly. I don't have enough pieces of the puzzle to add together, so all I can do is push forward until something makes sense.

I admit, that makes me uneasy. Deeply so. These things aren't to be toyed with... but at the same time, what choice to I have? Walk away and pretend that the apocalypse isn't coming? Following through with all this is the only option I see for myself.

In more mundane news, we met some highwaymen on the way back to the settlement. We dealt with them accordingly, albeit with some unnecessary complications which involved assaulting a minor settlement, tracking a wounded brigand into a bear's nest and me getting blasted point-blank in the face by what certainly felt like a fully incanted lightning bolt. We did get a pair of enchanted boots out of it though, which feels like a fair price for my eyebrows. After mopping up the rest of the bandits, we demolished their settlement just for good measure. I suppose it's expected that a lawless wilderness has a population of the unsavory types, but it still irked me.

Better yet, we just got a message that Farhold is dealing with riots. Apparently the human population is none too happy with the elves who have began incubating a green dragon egg in the middle of the town, a reaction which, frankly, baffles me. It's not going to mature in this century and it provides nontrivial agricultural enhancements in the meantime, so picking up arms about that seems inane to me. Given that we were the ones who fetched this egg for them, I feel a certain amount of responsibility to resolve the issue, one way or another. Perhaps the egg could be simply relocated, but something tells me it will not be that simple. I'll supplement this letter once I get there, as currently the postage is hiccuping due to the riots.

* * *

I'm writing this two days later, and it seems that my assessment of the "postage hiccupping" was somewhat understated.

Farhold burned.

I don't have the details as we were not here in time, but from what I gleaned the effects of the draconic incubation were substantially more prominent than expected (wildvines on the streets and such) and the anti-elven racial tensions boiled over which led to rioting, lynching and burning of houses. The latter in particular proved less than ideal, given how the settlement was tightly packed and thanks to the incubation, recently grown full of kindling.

The elves were utter morons. How could they not see this coming? Did they not inform anyone? Did they think the populace would take whatever change they brought in with open arms? Did they think the topic of growing a dragon in the middle of the city would be something to be casually broached?

And the rioters... simply disgusting. All else aside, it's an objective fact that _they_ were the ones who burnt it all to the ground simply because not one of them managed to bring up the novel concept of "fire spreads."

And yet... I feel responsible for that. Not entirely, or even primarily, but I—we—played a part. We should have ascertained the power dynamics in the settlement before bringing in the seed, but that is something that I didn't thought as necessary... but we did fetch an unknown magical object and parted with it without asking too many questions. That, I see with bitter retrospect, was a sin I cannot deny. There are scant few situations where you can ask too many questions when it comes to artifacts of old. I in particular am at fault there, as I feel like the others trust me in most matters thaumaturgical. I should have pored over books more on the subject. I should have charted out the incubation stages.

But, I did not, we did not, and here we are. The city is ash and embers now, the prematurely hatched dragon was put down—and I'd rather not get into details about that... grim but necessary business—and the population scattered to the winds. Olorik, our trusty dwarven companion, also met his fate in the city as he go tangled up in a riot. As did Cedric, the level-headed militia captain.

We obtained ample samples of the dragon's blood which is a slim compensation for those, but the one thing that did go right tonight was that we managed to save one elven child from the riots. Solomon, the chivalrous old bastard he is, charged a burning building in front of rioters to look for survivors, and upon their return I bestowed an hour of invisibility on her which hopefully carried her far enough to make it to greener pastures. One child for one city... it is a sour trade to make, but better than none at all.

It was... a long evening. I find it hard to write. It's been a long week. And a month. Ever since I set foot on this place, it's been nothing but one thing after another. I wholeheartedly rescind my recommendation for you to come explore these isles. It feels like the soil itself is cursed here.

In less depressing news—and it tells a lot about the current situation that this is the more pleasant part—Solomon is a theriantrope. Lucan, after empowering himself with the residual crystal emulsion we obtained from the mines, managed to manifest himself as an invisible transplanar form. He saw it fit to do some sort of soul-push on Solomon which, along with a helpful zap from Caliban, turned him into a were-rat.

Luckily Lucan managed to calm him down afterwards. Lucan claims that his soul looks ratty too which set off some alarm bells. A modest amount of research tells me that this might not be related to a previous were-rat incident since I don't believe those so drastically change one's soul, so the current hypothesis is that some sort of higher entity has marked him as its own. Whether it's intended as a curse or a blessing, we don't know, but given how the effect seems to turn him into a rabid rat, I think our evaluation of the situation is easy enough.

Your input on that would be appreciated if you have any, educated or not. Dealing with souls is risky business, and dealing with deities doubly so.

* * *

I'm writing this again two days later. We found a mysterious ritual circle on the way, but... I just need to get this on paper now. First of all: we are all in good health. Just to make that clear.

You know the Plague? The one which wiped out the Briths off the world map in a matter of weeks? The one which was terrifying enough to have the entire archipelago cordoned off for three centuries?

We found it.

I told you not to come here. I'm now more sure of that than ever.

We stumbled upon an old elven pre-plague mansion and decided to investigate it. In the basement, we found a fully equipped laboratory as well as an old corpse chained to the wall. Upon disturbing the corpse with Mage Hand (and thank every deity there is for that spell as well as my paranoia for using it) it partially reanimated due to some sort of strange, glowing worm colony infesting it. We dispatched the worms with ease, but I picked up a few samples remotely, only to find out that Lucan was screaming in Solomon's ear to burn them all. Apparently _they_ are the cause of the plague.

There was a scare when one of them squirmed out of the spell's hold, but we safely eradicated them... All but one.

Which is now in an alchemical jar in a metal box, sitting on the desk in front of me.

I know. You don't need to tell me.

But I have to keep it.

The worms survived for _three hundred years_ and became active instantly. The quarantine was not enough. I refuse to believe that this was an isolated incident, that no other person on any of the islands managed to barricade themselves before succumbing. There has to be other sites like this, long-rotten corpses filled with dormant worms just waiting for any unlucky sod to stumble upon them.

And then what? An outbreak and everyone is wiped out again. Who knows, maybe this time it's not going to be contained just here either.

It's a ticking time bomb. Any old hut or ditch could be the one which triggers a massacre when an enterprising adventurer is just one bit too slow when stepping over a moldy carcass.

This... This is imminent. Something needs to be done, _now._ The owner of the mansion seemed to have been trying to find a cure, but he ran out of time. We did obtain a mysterious magically sealed tome which he had attempted to unsuccessfully open, which I feel will be crucial for the process. I commandeered the laboratory equipment before torching the place, and I'm determined to finish what he started.

I have a live specimen to study, but I also have two things he did not: the Archive to back my research, and time. At least for now. I have only dabbled in alchemical matters before, only insofar as they pertain to verifying or obscuring the authenticity of documents, but I trust no-one else to do this. There are too many lives at stake for me to balk now.

I was intending to look into animatic diagnostics to develop an improved version of the Identify spell to get to the bottom of the soul mark Solomon is carrying as well as look into the strange static Caliban produces, but this takes precedence, for now.

I— I don't know. These responsibilities keep piling up and it feels like there's just never enough time.

Writing all this down was less cathartic than I thought it would be. The box is all but leering at me now.

I should get to the Archive. I need to get to work soon, and I'll be spending a lot of time there before I can even get started.

Just... If this—any of this—doesn't go well... You know what I told you when you left.

Yours Truly, C.S. Segundus


	6. Response 1: Wanted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Norrell responds with rather disconcerting news

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The GM was kind enough to write a reply to my ramblings from Norrell's point of view.

Res. Clark S. Segundus

Bumfuck Nowhere

Ruins of Farhold

Shaobrith

_12th of April, 982_

Can you imagine the surprise? Come back from three months travel into the dunes of Atalca, only

to **l** earn that my brother and his associates are wanted for destruction of an encampment?

How on **E** arth did this happen?

I expect a **v** aried list of reasons how you didn’t mean to burn down a whole settlement,

**e** xecute anyone who stood in your way, and how the newspapers spew horrid lies to sell more copies to the **r** abid masses who are outraged about the destruction of a small encampment on a far away island that only **m** ental person would actually visit willingly.

I trust my **a** mazing intuition and guess that you are still alive, seeing as your face is plastered all over **n** ot one, but all three kingdoms with a hefty 20,000g reward for your capture.

I do not believe in any way that you are responsible for the destruction of Farhold, nor do I believe that you caused the riots there. I do believe that you will have great impact on the future of the Briths. I hope that whatever you get yourself tied up in doesn’t lead to your demise. You were always the brains of the two of us, but a fighter I never saw in you. You must use your wits and cunning to stay alive. I’ve had too many close people die to sheer stupidity. I really urge you to not join that list.

What comes to my seals and the problem I have, it’s all under control. My associate helped me with some tonics that she has been brewing. They helped with the numbness in my fingers but do not worry your little head, worry about it getting cut off. Oh, we also considered binding my soul to a mummy we found deep in Atalca. Bind soul, light incense candles, burn corpse and voila! No more magic cancer! Okay sorry, bad joke but I did debate it for a while but knew that you would die from an aneurysm if you heard me trying it.

PS. I have a bad feeling that some people might come knocking on my door, so some sort of encoding is probably preferred. Do you happen to remember that coding system we came up way back when? Take the first letter of first word on the first line, second on the second word on the second line and so on. Repeating back from fourth letter onwards. Might start using that one from now on.

PS. PS. Say hi to Jóse, he shall be our way of communication, Mr. Donovan had willed him to me. Best messenger birds this side Kolgath.

PS. PS. PS. As I write this, I heard the tavern owner talking loudly to some guards searching for me. I am not in trouble as long as I am not seen communicating with you. I will take up on your suggestion on heading to Azagar jungles. Stay safe little brother.

Yours Truly, Norrell Segundus


	7. Letter 3: I Hit a Hiccup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark is none too happy about recent events.
> 
> Also includes one of my favorite RP moments to date which was a rather tense two-and-a-halfway argument about whether or not to attempt to study biological weapons of mass destruction.

Res. Norrell W. Segundus

Deserted Periferia

Some dune in Atalca

_18th of April, 982_

20-fucking-thousand? A piece?!

Unbelievable.

What's even more astonishing is that somehow they're blaming _us?_ All we did was bring back the dragon egg we were told was just a seed. It was the elves of the settlement who apparently lacked two brain cells to rub together to realize that cultivating that there unannounced was a good idea, and it was the xenophobic idiocy of the masses who thought that it was a good idea to try to burn down _one half_ of a densely populated town which just recently happened to be full of tinder.

We even put down the deranged drake with our own hands, and this is our thanks? Even the local wizard, Reunald, was nowhere to be seen and probably was the one who spirited away the dragon's corpse, too, after we were done with it.

With every other thing piling on top of us, the last thing we needed was a pack of ravening bounty-hunters going after an easy hit. Solomon has a lot of clout down on the mainland and connections to go with it, so I hope that he can at least contest the rumors before they spin out of control. Attached are four letters from him to various influencers which I hope your messenger can get across. Past that, I'm unsure how much we can do. These things... people need someone to blame, and we are already easy targets for that. Changing the public opinion isn't exactly easy, so if Solomon's word isn't enough and we find no convenient clues for a conspiracy, I'm short on ideas.

I'm not a stranger to, shall we say, taking the creative route when it comes to procuring convenient documentation when there is none to be found, but that is a last-ditch effort. Should I attempt that and have the plan backfire on our faces, it would cement us as the perpetrators.

My headhunt aside, who is this "she" you are referring to? Please for the love of gods don't tell me that you recruited a random hedge witch to poke at complex thaumedical constructs. Extremity numbness is somewhat alarming, so you should make sure that she's actually treating a cause rather than just a symptom. You generally have a good judge of character, so I dearly hope it hasn't let you down here. And please, mummies are the lowest form of necromancy there is. They have more to do with food preservation that actual magic! I'd die of shame if my dear brother became one. At least shoot for something marginally more prestigious, like an iron golem or something.

On that note, if she is more competent than I presumed, ask her if she is familiar with Haffmann imaging. It's a relatively simple method of recording raw thaumaturgical data, and while it's a mess and a half to even attempt to interpret, I feel like I have developed my intuition enough to possibly derive some meaning out of it. I have the beginnings of more accurate remote diagnostics formulae penned down, but I'm afraid I have a great many pressing responsibilities to juggle currently, so I haven't been able to make too much progress. I hate to make promises, especially given our situation now, but we are traveling towards Iral and I presume that the elves will know more of your ailment. The book I based the current design on was translated from Sylvan, after all, and as they are a very magically apt and long-lived species, I believe that they would have a keen interest in treating magical life-threatening diseases.

And as for me keeping myself safe... I feel I have already failed you.

I died.

Yes, I mean that. I'm almost certain I genuinely did leave my mortal coil.

It was a mimic disguised as a cave. To my infinite disappointment, I didn't leg it immediately after figuring out that something was afoot, and after a vicious fight, nearly before making it out of there, the encroaching slime became too much and everything went black.

That was it... Except I was suddenly in the Archive. And it _spoke._ I can't even describe that, but... It told me that it wasn't time. And that there would be a price.

Next thing I know, I woke up knee-deep in the goop, feeling healthier than ever, and I blasted the last of the mimic away to make it crawl back into whatever cracks it had seeped out from.

It makes my skin crawl. Something happened there, and I have no idea what. I theorized that the Archive might be sentient, and that certainly confirms it... Whether that is good or not, I do not know. I always felt like I was chosen in some way, but having that affirmed doesn't ease my mind. Especially when I noticed that my venous blood has seemingly been replaced by what seems to be identical in consistency to hawthorn ink.

I don't know. I just don't. Don't ask.

I'll... just need to be more paranoid in the future. That feels like it's my usual conclusion, and I'm not sure how many times it's going to work.

In better news, I'm familiarizing myself with the alchemical methods rapidly. I believe I should be able to create some athanoric coal for Harbek who is planning on upgrading his cart to a mobile smithy. It's the absolute least I can do for the poor dwarf after everything we've piled on him just by association. In addition, I have an ample supply of green dragon's blood to work with, which I'm certain will have some interesting applications as I dig in deeper.

PS: I am pleasantly surprised by José. I'd love to hear just what sort of critter he is. And please, should you have a way of communing him, convey my apologies for loading him to the brim on our first meeting.

Yours Truly, C.S. Segundus


	8. Letter 3.5: Writing Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark writes home, giving a rather rose-colored description of what has happened.

Res. Walter Segundus & Arabella Segundus

Woodhope Street 17

Lascelles Province

Hurtfew Village

_14th of April, 982_

Hello, Father. Apologies for the irregular correspondence, but between the terrible postal connections and the immense amount of busywork I've found myself tangled into, I can hardly find time to sleep these days. And you thought I would learn to take care of myself while out in the nature, hah.

Shaobrith is absolutely filled with fascinating things you wouldn't believe. We ran into an utterly _cyclopean_ rust monster which was stuck in a cave, gorging on a strange magical residue. I illustrated the beast on the backside, marked with the number 1.

Needless to say, we hightailed out of there as soon as we saw it. Though I confess I did sneak out a sample of the residue, from a safe distance of course. We also stumbled upon a Wanderlust commune on the way, and I had long talks with their local archivist. It was refreshing to meet a fellow bibliophile out here in the wilderness, and one focused on preservation too! And not only that, but we also witnessed an outright legendary event of an Eladrin intervention. At the end of a long funeral celebration, a portal opened (2) and a group of nigh-mythical Eladrin (3) walked through from the Feywild, and they revived the person whose funeral procession was being celebrated. Such a thing hasn't happened in centuries, and so it was unspeakably lucky of us to see it with our own eyes.

We also saw a cave mimic (4). The shapeshifter had morphed to form the insides of a small cave, and it gave us quite the scare when I realized what was going on. We fled and managed to beat it down handily, and we got a set of golden rings for our troubles too from a less lucky adventurer that had succumbed inside it. Perhaps more importantly too, I also managed to snatch a small notebook with nearby points of interest outlined in it.

Another oddity was an old abandoned elven manor. It was boarded up and we explored it thoroughly, and it was quite eerie. It was inhabited by a lone wolf (5). We scared it away by blasting open one of the rotten boarded windows, and Harbek, our dwarven travel companion who was guarding the cart, put us all on edge by ringing the alarm bell. We all breathed in relief when we realized that he was only alerting us to the very same noise we were making to scare away the wolf. Communication skills are important.

Other than the wolf, the manor had a few items of interest. We found an mysterious magical tome which I'm eager to decypt, and I also managed to spirit away a fully equipped alchemy set from the basement. I've been studying that a lot more recently, and I feel that I have some potential as an alchemist, even if only as a hobby.

There are so many things to do that I can hardly decide which one to go for. There are rumors of a hidden library on the island, there is a large and ancient elven settlement to the east, I have the new alchemy set, all these mysterious items and substances to study, and even the northern isles have some goliath tribes there which I was told I might find interesting.

I hope you two are doing well, too. I have to admit, while I've never been a culinary mind, I do miss freshly baked bread every morning, and hardtack really gets on my nerves after a while... At least we have a hunter with us so we are not short on meat all the time.

Last I heard, the new magistrate there had been settling into his job quite comfortably. Hopefully there hasn't been much friction... Hurtfew has small circles and few people, so any new face showing up is always a larger change than most would think.

Tell my regards to Vinculus, and tell him that I miss his mediocre wares. Also say hello to Dibbler for me the next time you go to the general store. Don't tell him that I miss him, though—for a small man, he has a towering ego. And Arabella—keep your husband out of trouble, will you?

Love, Clark.

* * *

[On the inside of the envelope, written in invisible ink]

_Hi mother. I knew you'd catch me first-naming you._

_I told Father the truth in broad strokes... Except that we're in a bit of a pickle._

_I don't want to get into details because they are largely irrelevant, but the short of it is that we delivered an easily accessible magical artifact to the local elf society, and I made the grave mistake of not asking enough questions, because the artifact turned out to be a dragon egg. By then, we had long since left to explore the Wanderlust settlement._

_The dragon in and of itself wasn't dangerous, as it wouldn't have been hostile by default, but the elves mismanaged the situation immensely by failing to convey the effects of the incubation to the denizens. That involved rapidly accelerated plant growth, and the citizens went_ ballistic _to the point of inciting an outright pogrom which culminated in the raving idiots lighting the town on fire. It was... bad. Very bad. The dragon hatched prematurely from the assault, and as it was blinded and enraged, we had to put it down by our own hands._

_And these people have the audacity of blaming us for burning down the town. We were neither aware nor even there when the violence started. We have now several processes underway to dispel the rumors, but until we get it under control, well. I hate to disappoint you, but your son is a wanted man for now. Not that Norrell hasn't had some bad blood between him and people with money, but I think I've outdone him on this one._

_I didn't want Father to worry, hence the trickery with the inks. Truthfully, I don't know how much of my name I can clear, but I hope it's enough that the rumors won't spread all the way down south. Hurtfew in particular is so isolated that I don't think you'll hear about fugitives in the wilderness._

_This island... There is something_ wrong _here. I can't quite put my finger to it, but it's dangerous. Not like an owlbear, but like a poisoned well is. It's insidious._

_I promise I'll be careful._

_Love you._


	9. Letter 4: Ex-ex-elf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some positive progress is made for once.

Res. Norrell W. Segundus

Deserted Periferia

Some dune in Atalca

_21st of April, 982_

It's been a busy few days. The misbegotten mimic cave I mentioned earlier contained the diary of an adventurer who had penned down a few nearby points of interest which we began exploring. One unrelated one was a curious set of elemental circles (fig. 1) near an alcove of some sort. Caliban had keen interest on it, but beyond translating the words, I could make neither heads nor tails from it. Whatever equipment we had at hand was unsuccessful at triggering the mechanism, so whatever it is will have to remain a mystery for the time being. Perhaps the circles need items from their relative planes to trigger?

We also found the campus of a long-abandoned academy called Ledasin which had a few surprises. Pleasant ones, for the most part. Firstly a vault with a slew of valuables we commandeered under the premise that it had been lost for three centuries before our arrival. The smithy housed a dormant fire elemental, and as a favor to Harbek, we released and subdued it to implant it into a small heat pad to create a portable forge. Looks like my plans for creating alchemical coal are unnecessary, now, though with the added equipment in the carriage, my own research is running into space issues given the amount of material I need at hand. Perhaps I should look into demiplane creation.

More interestingly, the arcane studies wing proved more intact than the rest. It had a constructed intelligence housed in it which provided some useful tidbits. For one: Lucan, the elf spirit, used to be a student here, though not on architecture. There is one enrolled student still alive, and the headmistress is apparently still alive. Aggravatingly, the place also had an extensive library, but it was barred from non-members. So close, yet so far away. I'll have to try to contact the headmistress and ask about that, perhaps a favor or two could be arranged in exchange for unrestricted access. The campus also had a functional teleportation circle in it, which we might be able to make use for.

The constructed intelligence also showed a wildly outdated map of the Briths, so old that the islands were still one instead of two, but more curiously it quickly picked up on my mention of Aleshara. If you don't remember, that was the cloister that led me here. The Archive "requested" a book called _Ways of War_ which was written by a member of Aleshara. It was supposed to have been inactive for centuries after the plague, but I found some more recent references which fit into the convoluted formula of release dates and forewords which I had derived from patterns in the Archive, and said formula had an empty slot for exactly that book. I happened to find a copy from the Wanderlust settlement which led us to discover Lucan, and I had pushed the cloister from my mind afterwards. However, the campus's spectral assistant conveniently told me its exact location, and I'm very interested in seeing where it leads. Perhaps Lucan wasn't the goal there after all for the Archive?

We didn't quite make it there yet, but we did a detour to the tower of a wizard called Brosco. In true wizardly nature, the tower had a dimensional portal leading to a separate plane with three secondary towers each housing even more demiplanes with each containing and elemental key required to open the primary one. Frankly, the lengths those people go just for the sake of showmanship over practicality is stunning. Maybe the pointy hats draw out their humors or something, but please, if I ever think that it would be a good idea to connect to a plane of sand with a dozen kilometers long sandworm in it just so I can hide my house key here, just tell me that I'm losing my marbles.

Bosco himself was present... in spirit, if not mind. He was a ghost, and after three centuries of isolation, had apparently lost his wits to cabin fever. We tried to placate him, but he was entirely incoherent outside of rather colorful Gnomish swearing, so Lucan stepped forward and made him "move on." How, I don't know, but as a spirit I suppose he can affect spiritual beings differently.

However here is the kicker: Lucan told us that he's the actual owner of the tower. He requested that we drop his pendant into a pool of strange green liquid, and after we did so, he somehow regenerated a healthy, living body from the vat and crawled out.

Took us by surprise, too. He was a generous host, though, after offering us dinner. After talking for a long while, I'm inclined to trust him. He had an interest in extending his own lifespan via un-undead manners, and the cloning process he demonstrated seemed humane enough. The previous owner of the tower, Bosco, apparently had taken offense to that, and murdered him as the plague broke loose. A combination of pride, doubt and sheer memory loss meant that he didn't tell us everything, but while that grated me, I am willing to overlook it. None of us are without our flaws. Or secrets. His openness and hospitality after, you know, regaining a brain to think with has won me over, and I see no reason to distrust him. From a more practical point of view, having a powerful mage owing us his life also does not come without its own benefits.

He also gave us a free pick from his not-modestly stocked vault as a reward for returning him to his mortal coil. Solomon chose an enchanted elven sword from the hoard while Caliban absorbed the ashes of a dead phoenix. I myself found a book.

A bronze book with no markings. I opened it, and... It was painful in a manner I cannot convey via text. It hurt a part of me that had never hurt before, something deep in my head. But I could glean enough to grasp the meaning.

It was a book of Creation. With a capital C.

The Archive is a repository of all that is, but it is not complete. I could not bear to read the book without knocking two digits off my IQ and then some, but I knew where it belonged.

The Archive was... pleased. In exchange, I got some rather exquisite robes, the practicality of which you would likely approve of, and a rather novel spell for unraveling illusions and their ilk. I won't go into details as I know how they bore you, but that one is clever. You know the saying of someone not seeing the forest from the trees? This is the equivalent of setting the woods on fire to see what remains standing.

Yours Truly, C.S. Segundus


	10. Ratted Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark experiments with his new psychometric abilities

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also included: one of the spell cards we use for keeping track of all of the million feats, spells, boons, features, enchantments and whatever else under the sun.

* * *

Clark felt something stir at the back of his mind. The rat floating in the grip of a mage hand in front of him was squirming as he reached over to grasp its tail, taking the appendage between his fingers and breathing deeply.

There was... _substance,_ there. Beyond just flesh and blood, there was a thrum of something that was pressing against a sense he hadn't had. A presence. Something contained in the vessel, just under a veil.

Without moving a muscle, he took that veil and peeled it away. The line between the material and immaterial blurred and shook as he forced his will onto the soul of the rat, and under his eyes, the rat stiffened as its fur split and twisted, revealing dry parchment underneath. He could feel resistance there, building, some instinctive part of the animal scrambling for control over its fundamental identity. His eyes flickered through the pages as they turned on their own, making him find sentences flipping open where he was about to look.

_Born from a litter of six._

_Sired 17, 10 of which left nest alive._

_Dodged an eagle yesterday._

_Survived grass fever last spring._

_Terrified._

Clark breathed out, feeling how the veil convulsed and fought against him, even something as insignificant as a rat taxing his mind as he fought it on its own turf, its feral mind clawing at his own psyche. He ignored that and with practiced ease, drew an F-shape with his thumb against the rat's tail and spoke, _"Worm."_

The seeking spell took hold as the syllables completed it, and the rat quivered, its pages stilling when the spell rooted itself onto them. It took far longer for the spell to act than it usually did, but just before Clark lost control over the veil, the rat twitched as the pages reeled backward at a blistering speed, long enough to cover entire volumes.

 _Ate an earthworm last month,_ it simply read, and the rat's soul finally tore itself from his mental grasp and the fur slid back with no sign that anything had happened as the rat regained control over itself, squirming wildly to get away. Clark closed his eyes and took a deep breath, partially out of relief and partially from feeling his mind fatigued from the exposure as residual animalistic details clung to his thoughts like tar. He doubted those would last, but he wasn't looking forward to repeating the process before waiting for the effects to subside. With a thought, he deposited the rat into a jar and sealed it for future study.

Deep in thought, he looked at the panicked animal scurrying against the glass walls trapping it. The spell only brought up a mention about earthworms which reassuringly meant it had not seen plague worms. The transmuted pages seemed to be attuned to him specifically given how they almost predicted the movements of his eyes, so abnormal enchanted glowing parasites would have definitely been highlighted by the seeking spell.

That aside, the ability felt like... Necromancy. It reeked of soul-reading, but while technically speaking it might be just astoundingly accurate psychometry, he had his doubts. That raised interesting questions. Would it work on an amnesiac? The spell seemed to work off his comprehension, not the target's, as clearly the rat couldn't be aware of what hay fever was. The method had rather limited applications, but the ones it had were... potent.

Clark took a pen in his hand, flipping it around a few times as he glanced in Caliban's direction, who was currently engaged in a confusing conversation about bees with Solomon. Clark turned back to the rat, tapping his finger on the rock he was writing on, and opened his notebook. Would repeated applications cause the subject to develop a resistance? Would the spell always find the same phrases? Was the transformation physical or illusory? Was it painful or only stressing? Did it manifest differently on humans?

He tapped the pen nib on the rock a few more times before drawing a blank page and flourishing it with a title as his mind started going through the questions, formulating potential experiments for each. This would need additional research.


	11. An illusion... What are you hiding?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark muses on how his new revealing spell works

Clark's bed stood untouched in the corner of the room he had been provided. A softly flickering lamp floated in the middle of the room, bathing the worn stones in orange light.

He sat in front of a desk, a scroll unfolded on it with a number of scattered pages covering the rest of the surface. He had begun extrapolating the tightly coiled lines of power from the scroll, slowly sketching them out further onto the adjacent parchments to see what made it tick.

It was... genius. Whoever—or whatever—had created this was nothing short of a savant. The mechanism aside, even the formulaic representation was eloquent, with concentric diagrams of unshaped mana somehow balancing each other out with no boundary diffusion, each layer of complexity more interconnected than the last. And the mechanism itself... It was madness and ingenuity in equal parts, realized with almost impossible finesse.

It was a semiotic spell, at its core. Pertaining to the comprehension and transmission of concepts. Clark's own enhanced eyes were relying on the same principle: that there was weight to meaning. The number 5 drawn on paper by a person carried more _weight_ than one drawn on sand by an errant branch in the wind, because in one of those cases there was a will behind it. Clark's eyes made use of that, and looked slightly beyond just ink and parchment to see intent rather than text.

But this spell, it made mockery of Clark's finest work. Where he barely touched upon the surface of the sea of concepts and power underlining the material world, this spell turned that to kindling and lit it on fire. Semiotics worked on the idea of things being understood, and he could read beyond text because it was meant to be understood. Illusions worked somewhat similarly, if on reverse. They were dependent on being perceived, so each illusion was uniquely tailoring itself to each entity observing it. This spell, though? It took a battering ram to everything kin to that. It was insanity, in one word, as Clark tried to make sense of a dense cluster of self-referencing symbols. It would generate a boiling cacophony of pseudo-observers, strings of magic similar to a human mind as a speck of dust is to a mountain. It would create these by the millions, building until it exploded in a maelstrom of invisible conceptual chaos, spreading in all directions and _looking_ at anything and everything.

And if there was anything there that responded to being observed? It would crumble, collapsing under the impossible strain of a million contradictory and alien points of view imposing their own ever-shifting perception upon the spell.

He didn't dare cast it, though. He likely could, even without full comprehension... But what he saw was unsettling. The elegant lines of raw power seemed to leave a substantial weakness: lack of scalability. The spell required a certain amount of thaumic pressure for the reaction to start, and any less simply wouldn't be enough to breach the initial boundary. But with that much pressure, the process would cascade upon itself, growing uncontrollably and spreading wide before exhausting itself. It was difficult to gauge, but given the unnatural efficiency of the spell, he estimated that it would have a radius of 100 meters, minimum, until the pseudo-observers thinned out and iterated themselves out of existence. Unleashing a spell like that in the house of a fellow mage felt not only highly unprofessional, but given the illusory nature of the estate, equally dangerous.

He could test it later on, though, after learning the full extent of the formula. The sheer eloquence of its construction was already giving him insights into the topic, and several ideas for building upon his existing spells. He paused for a second, running an estimation in his head before drawing a projection of an arc further down the desk, a smile growing on his face as he realized that it must be the part responsible for letting loose the final pulse which carried the effect of the spell. How many illusions could withstand that?

Very few, Clark thought as he turned the diagram in his head, drawing another arc radiating away from the middle. This spell was anathema to most attempts at magical obfuscation.

The Archive wanted secrets, did it?

Then deliver he would.


	12. Omake: fuck the law tbh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because I felt like writing a justified diatribe about the fucks who put a bounty on us

_To: Magistrate Bartholomew Anderson_

Greetings,

My name is Clark Strange Segundus, writing to you in behalf of a man named Caliban and Solomon Sternfort.

I was quite astonished to be contacted by an acquaintance to be informed that my companions and I have a bounty of no less than twenty thousand (20,000) gold pieces on each of our heads, and that said bounties come with the rather severe specifier of "alive or dead" which means that currently, I am too concerned for my own safety to even make an appearance in a public setting—hence my impersonal approach.

I am appalled to learn that the justice system of the honored Union has so swiftly forgotten its due process—unless, of course, the venerated chambers of _Lex Cathedra_ followed proper procedure and in the span of three days after the event, conducted exhaustive review to all but deem three men into the gallows with not as much as the faintest attempt at contacting the people actually involved.

This letter, and the timeline outlined below, are meant to supplement what I am certain was _astonishingly_ thorough investigation into what passed at Farhold, a tragedy that has been abruptly, unjustifiably and all too hastily peddled off onto the backs of three travelers who had barely set foot on the continent.

On April 1st, we arrived to Farhold on _Her Majesty's March_ , captained by Theodore Overbeck as noted on the logs in Northport. I traveled here to recover lost documentation, Solomon on a personal journey and Caliban simply to explore. Not once before had any of us as much as even seen each other, but given our common goal of delving into the wilderness, we thought it prudent to form a group for our own safety.

April 4th, after acquainting ourselves with Farhold, we were contacted by the leader of the local elven church, Lia wossname, who requested that we retrieve a large seed of some magical importance for their church. As a sign of goodwill and at no small personal risk, we chose to accept and did soon enough manage to locate and retrieve said seed. To us, they merely claimed that it would improve the local agricultural returns, so we thought little of it and moved on.

April 14th, four days before the burning of Farhold, we learn of a location of a nearby Wanderlust commune making their camp at an abandoned town of nearby Nylfmelle, and we choose to depart for there in hopes of finding hints about other abandoned complexes worth exploring. Dozens of members of said commune will back this claim, as we spent time there extensively in addition to assisting them on their local ghoul problem.

Finally, on April 16th, I receive a letter from Cedric Hills, the captain of Farhold militia we had become relatively well-acquainted with. He requested us, specifically and by name, to return to Farhold to help the militia quell pervasive rioting (see the transcript on supplement 1A). Before that moment, we hadn't an inkling of what was going on in Farhold. We departed posthaste, as between Solomon's authority and the not insignificant magical prowess of Caliban and I, we felt it our duty to serve as peacekeepers.

And, on the fateful day of April 18th, we arrived to see a burning town. By then, most of the elven district had already caught fire and riotous mobs were swarming the streets. We rushed to the streets to attempt to understand what is going on, but the fire was already beyond our control. After a brief and fruitless attempt at extinguishing the docks, we moved on to find Cedric and his militia. They were nowhere to be seen, and only after questioning a passing mob did we learn that they were _butchering_ all elves in the city, with several of them already hanged on the gates. The fire, as near as I could tell in the chaos, was if not lit then at least demonstrably exacerbated by the raving mobs who were burning down elf dwellings in a tightly packed settlement.

After one of them recognized us, the mob bizarrely blamed us for bringing a dragon into their town. Only then did we learn that the "seed" we had helpfully delivered to the elves was a green dragon egg, which they inexplicably chose to incubate in the middle of a populated settlement. Not willing to resort to violence, we fled and distracted the mob from our backs to find Cedric and the soon-to-emerge dragon from the middle of the town square now dominated by a large tree. Cedric we did find, lying on the street and despicably killed by a blunt object to the back of the head. We also found the dragon, and casting aside all concern for our own safety, we engaged it in combat. It was malformed from the disturbed incubation, but it was a dragon nonetheless and it nearly took our lives to finally put it down. No thanks to Reunald, the local wizard who was nowhere to be seen during their hour of need.

After narrowly besting the deformed dragon and exhausted beyond measure, we chose to leave the rapidly deteriorating town and gather our bearings come morning.

We left towards Iral, the nearest settlement we knew of, and imagine our surprise when after going through the harrowing event and almost losing our lives to contain it, _we_ are the ones blamed.

Pray tell me what logic did go into this rushed judgement? What was there for us to possibly gain from orchestrating such a wildly convoluted and unreliable attack on a friendly settlement? If summoning dragons was something we were capable of, I assure you that there are far more efficient ways of turning drakes into destruction than poorly smuggling one into a town where it's trivially easily discovered. All this and more I would be more than willing to confess to under any veracity enchantments you can imagine—that is, were I not risking my life by making myself a target for any opportune bounty hunter all too willing to take crown gold from your hands in exchange for my own head.

Caliban and I are only journeymen, if well-educated ones, but Solomon is a renowned war hero and ruler of no small duchy, so I am certain that if you have not heard from his supporters, you soon will.

We impatiently await your response, and we dearly hope that this whole terrible misunderstanding can be rectified. My own reputation may already be beyond salvaging thanks to the exquisitely expeditious declaration of our purported crimes, but at the very least we require the bounties voided and the missives recalled, lest we meet our end due to a knife in the dark that you have funded.

Yours Truly, Clark. S. Segundus, Solomon T.Q. Sternfort, and Caliban


	13. Letter 5: And Know I Shall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark wants to get into a barred archive and they don't let him.
> 
> He doesn't take kindly to that.

Res. Norrell W. Segundus

Deserted Periferia

Some dune in Atalca

_25st of April, 982_

The Archive is incomplete.

This I've known.

It is not perfect, but it ought to be. My contract with it is not explicit or written down anywhere—which, now that I think of it, is rather incongruous given the endless amount of paperwork it contains—but the central tenet of my relationship with it is and always has been that of improvement, to bring it closer to what it is meant to be. I categorize. I repair, and I add.

There are always small imperfections in it. Duplicate entries. Misfiled content. Uncategorized material. Outdated texts, damaged volumes, and sometimes with incredible rarity, even missing books. But outright gaps in knowledge it really does not have. Even the most obscure topics have some leads there, and if one cannot find something, that is mostly because of one's own inability rather than lack of material. That is, with one glaring exception.

Aleshara is black hole there. It's an unremarkable printing monastery on an unremarkable plot of land, but I have found not a single reference to its existence in the entirety of the Archive. None. There are endless folders full of receipts, limericks, cooking recipes, quarterly reports, grocery lists, scribbles and burnt paper there detailing every conceivable scrap of written human thought, but not a single mention to this place. That was strange indeed, and it was also the primary reason as to why I left for Shaobrith in the first place. It was curious, but it was also my only data point on the Archive's limits, so I could draw no conclusions from it.

Until today, that is. We attempted to gain access to to the monastery of Aleshara, having finally found it after considerable research, and we were barred access. The entry point was warded strongly enough to make my hairs stand on an end, and when in place of an entry token I attempted to give it my journal—a book tied deeply to the Archive—not only was it rejected, it was rejected violently. Spurred on by this, I dug in deeper into the topic and encountered the name Talath, to which the monastery was dedicated.

The name is familiar to me, being one of the innumerable names for one of the obscure gods local to this island, but then it dawned to me that not only is it an actively worshiped god, but also a god of knowledge. Religions have never interested me, but I keep track of local deities and especially ones that relate to knowing things, so overlooking something like Talath was a gross oversight from my part. In fact, gross enough to raise several questions, one of which was answered by a trip to the Archive, as when I sought to fill this gap, my searches returned nothing. Talath is a concrete, unique name that should be at least referred to in many places, so I refuse to believe that there is no information on it available, and yet the Archive did not give me a single lead, not even the most roundabout third-hand scrap of knowledge. It is a blind spot. As if someone had systematically erased all mentions on that topic from the shelves.

This is both unnerving and, weirdly, exciting. It is difficult for me to convey this properly, but the Archive is the ground I stand on. I prize the wealth of knowledge I have, and most of it has come directly from the Archive. My understanding on dimensionalism. Medical guidelines. Emphatic linking principles. Mana flow shaping. Limits of formulaic casting. Political history. How to sharpen a razor. So much of what makes me _me_ I have taken from the Archive, so if it has glaring deficiencies, what does that say about me? It is unsettling to think that the source that I have taken as nigh-on absolute in reliability suddenly turned out to be more flawed than I ever thought. It may sound egoistical or even childish, but this flaw in my expertise frightens me the slightest bit. But this is a flaw I am now aware of, and thus it is something I can start remedying. There is lot to gain here.

Aleshara was apparently one of the last bastions before the Plague. It also served as a sanatorium, so it is likely full of zombies lying in wait. That is the best-case scenario, I feel. (And doesn't that sentence tell you everything you need to know about the state of this island, gods above.) If we are in luck, there will be only slow and dumb dead there which should be easy enough to neutralize before we loot—excuse me, _investigate_ the place. I entertain a hope that we might even discover a lead to the cure on the plague, presuming that their research teams were active for long enough before the end came.

I will not lie, this operation does make me somewhat apprehensive. The average zombie I trust we can handle, but there are worse things out there that can walk after death, and stranger threats still. Given the rejection we got with my brand of library card, I feel like the patron deity of this particular settlement does not want to be known to the Archive. Not only strongly enough to make that happen—no small feat—but also strongly enough to keep itself hidden thereafter. There are precious few things that can keep me out of libraries, so we solved the entry issue by procuring several unused access tokens that should let us in, but after the door is open, I do not know what awaits us.

I feel like I am making a statement here. Sure, I have always been an "ally" to the Archive—though "contractor" would be a more apt description—but now I am taking a stand. Another being has made it clear that it wants no part with the Archive and rather unsubtly batted me over the head with a psychic shock when I tried to force the issue, and now I am about to cheat my way in. Is there an allegiance here? Something I am declaring that cannot be taken back?

Or is this just a memory of a long-dead god clinging to relevancy via lingering artifacts? That feels like wistful thinking.

I cannot explain why, but I feel like this is the right choice. I could turn back and walk away. Start researching any of the hundreds of other topics that are burning a hole on my list of things to learn. I could leave this god alone in this corner it has holed itself in, but that doesn't sit right with me. It is like an insult. Some unknown entity telling me that I have no right to know what it does, what it wants. That it has things that I am not _permitted_ to know.

That sickens me.

The Archive is open for everyone with enough will to learn. It does not coddle me. It doesn't ban, censor, omit or discriminate. It does what an archive is supposed to do: it _stores._ It takes it all; the irrelevant and the grand, the atrocious and the divine. The whole panoply of sapient thought in all its terrifying beauty, catalogued and laid bare for anyone with enough resolve to meet it head-on. There are things in there that I am not to know—yet. And that is a line I have drawn for myself out of my own volition. Someone else might choose differently. Maybe they'd learn secrets I cannot, or maybe they'd die an unspeakable death for their folly, but in the end that is their choice. Someone else deciding between ignorance or cognizance on their behalf is, for the lack of a better term, blasphemy of the highest order that I recognize.

Excuse my rambling, I've found myself in an ideological fervor. I hate this kind of hoarding, and it's just like with the wizards in their ivory towers. They are sitting on their troves of academic treasure, jealously guarding what nuggets of insight they have discovered. Turning their backs to one another like crabs in a bucket, keeping everyone down because they have this—this _inane_ preconception that somehow tomes and knowledge are _theirs_ and therefore cannot be _others'._ They seethe and scheme as if they were dragons on a hoard of gold, basking in their own magnificence while being utterly blind to what lies out there. Perhaps you can tell that I have not quite forgotten how Reunald watched Farhold burst and burn while he did nothing. Deities seem to be no different.

Perhaps I am selling Talath and its followers short here. Maybe they are an ally to be recruited, something to meet on equal terms. But whatever the case, they have chosen to shut themselves in and refuse even audience. And because they have made this _choice_ to keep me in the dark, I am forced to drag them to light.

For better or worse, this is where I stand. I am not an archivist, but an Archivist.

Yours Truly, C.S. Segundus

P.S. Along the way, I also picked up a rather novel book on advanced thaumobiotics. I am pressed for time even after I lost the need to sleep and I do not want to get your hopes up, but... I'm getting there. I promise.


	14. Letter 6: Entering and Breaking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark worms his way into the barred archive and emerges victorious.
> 
> Or at least alive.

Res. Norrell W. Segundus

Deserted Periferia

Some dune in Atalca

_28st of April, 982_

So, we did gain entry to Aleshara. It was full of mindless shambling people, but against all expectations, not a singular undead.

Yes, let that sink in. We did not walk into a death trap for once. Optimism, I've come to learn, is a fickle thing that causes more trouble than it's worth, so imagine my surprise when, after getting in, we met a friendly face offering us cabbage stew.

Regrettably, Aleshara was in shambles. It was populated by three things: a breed of wraiths serving as custodians, a small army of braindead scholars, and Theodore who was the last man with his wits still with him.

The history of the place was curious. There was a small town near the trail leading up to it, filled with people who were reverent of the scholars residing inside Aleshara, even after three hundred years of silence. The monastery itself had been barricaded up after the plague flared, and for some reason the denizens within slowly lost their minds. Now they litter the corridors, unthinking and drooling, only kept alive by Theodore's constant vigilance. I was curious about the latrine arrangements, but I'll amend my last letter to add that there are some things man is not ought to know.

The atmosphere there was oppressive. Caliban and Solomon managed just fine, but my connection to the Archive was severed the moment we stepped in. That's a very fundamental part of me, and even without the feeling of having a part of your soul cut out, knowing that you just can't snap your fingers to read up on any arbitrary topic to brush up on your expertise left me feeling vulnerable. Not to mention that all of my magic comes from the Archive, ultimately, which goes very much against all the wards set up over that place.

I dug into the libraries there greedily, but I was left disappointed. Most of the material was very surface-level, and most of the rarer tomes were already familiar to me or substandard. Seriously, they had put Havelock's _Of Djinn and Dragons_ in a vitrine. He barely even _visited_ the Highlands before writing that book!

It turned out that this was only the outer archive, which explained the deficiencies. The inner sanctum, where everything important would be, had been barred, and the administrator himself who had the privilege of access was unable to swallow gruel without prompting.

Theodore had managed to put himself in quite a pickle, there. He could not leave, lest all of his compatriots would die a slow death, and as such coaxing more from him was embarrassingly easy, as he also believed that the robes I wore—a gift from the Archive I mentioned earlier—marked me as a high-ranking ally of his. He told us that there were ways of reassigning the administrative position, and I was the prime candidate for that now.

It was probably a poor idea. The very compound itself was actively shunning my presence there, and the god it was dedicated to had erased himself from the eyes of my patron. Butting my head against a divine decree like that is something that could probably be described as arrogance, but then again, I am here writing to you, am I not?

I smiled and told him that I would happily take that burden upon myself. He was delighted to have someone there to restore the place to its former glory, and we set up the promotion ritual. Fascinating piece of magic, that, and it took a while to prepare. When we begun the ritual itself, though, we were rather rudely interrupted when an avatar of Talath appeared in a cloud of lightning, screaming something about heretics and impostors.

I tried to negotiate. I attempted to explain that we needed all help we could get to save the island, but the avatar reacted as I had expected it would: with indiscriminate violence. Clad in rage and thunder, it tried to smite us—and managed to obliterate Theodore who was trying to escape—but we put it down swiftly enough with the aid of a few potions of invulnerability. Do write that one down; those things are rare but exceptionally potent in a pinch.

After the avatar fell, we completed the ritual unimpeded. I entered the sanctum sanctorum, and there I met Talath.

 

* * *

 

 

_Page 2_

I got you with that page change, didn't I? I apologize for the theatrics. I didn't quite meet a deity eye to eye, but I did find his corpse. Either abandoned or just conventionally dead, but there sat an enormous corpse of a giant with a crown on its head. It did not stop me as I walked past it to the inner archive, the entry of which made me do a double-take. It was almost identical to the entryway to the Archive itself, only missing the enormous codex and the bell to take you out.

What is the relationship between Talath and the Archive? Was he a spurned student, trying to build his own? Or was the Archive something that grew beyond his control? Allies, soured by some difference? I do not know, and this type of uncertainty is what wonders are made of. This is the type of question that leads somewhere important, and I'm keen to learn more of it.

Regardless, I got to work. I mentioned that unraveling spell in an earlier letter, didn't I? The Archive gave me an ancient ritual to put to good use. Its workings are fascinating, but what it essentially does is conjure a mind-boggling amount of pseudo-observers, tiny strings of consciousness, and then generates a violent ethereal explosion of them which overloads, disrupts and just annihilates all illusory magic within a large area. It's the antithesis to any kind of secrecy. A battering ram, or more like a bomb which bowls over all trickery and gimmicks that are used to secret things away.

I constructed and triggered the ritual right there in the heart of the monastery. The wards crumbled, and I let the Archive in.

It doesn't... think. I think. Not like you or I do. It certainly doesn't feel. But then and there, with the magic rushing in like an ocean crashing through a broken dam, I felt _glee_ that was only partially my own.

It was a good feeling.

These people, this god—they had tried to keep me away, to kill me rather than negotiate, and where had that taken them? To ruin, with me at the helm of what remained.

I do apologize for this kind of grandiose posturing, but _I did it._ I won.

After the Archive had subsumed the contents within, returned to the main halls of Aleshara. I did commit some mild desecration on the way out by extracting pieces of the dead avatar for further study—how can a god even die? Curious, curious—and moved to restructure the monastery better to my liking.

The ritual had left everyone outside shaken. It only targets concealing spells, but with enough force to do a number to regular humans too. Solomon and Caliban had thought that something had gone wrong, but they came back to their senses soon enough.

With Theodore dead, we were the only three sane people there. I would rather not leave the people within to die, so I chose to strike two birds with one stone. I am in charge of the compound now, with all the wards keyed to me and open to modification. There's a wealth of knowledge here, and a base of operations, so an ambitious thought has stricken me.

Why not take it for myself?

I do effectively own it already. And the town below agrees. Why not bring them here? Let them take care of the braindead scholars and build something to replace the decrepit husk this place had become. As per my instructions, of course.

I hope I'm not letting this success get into my head. I might be overreaching, establishing an outpost like this. But at the same time, it would be cruel to leave these people to die of thirst and zombies, and what's the harm?

In any case, hopefully in the near future you can send your messages to an actual address, now. I might be able to figure out some kind of a relay system. These coming days will be very busy ones, especially after we start settling the villagers in.

Yours Truly, _C.S. Segundus._


	15. Bad news, worse news, terrible news and a job opportunity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clark returns from Aleshara to have a long overdue chat with the townsfolk.

Clark walked into the meeting room of the village leader, his eyes flicking over the walls. After he had completed the unraveling ritual in the heart of Aleshara, the dancing shadows in his vision had gotten... clingier, as if they were sticking to objects. They were entirely illusory, he was certain, but the way they stuck to items he knew were magical struck him as odd. Ever since his untimely death and revival a month ago, his vision had been tainted by odd movements that seemed to have no rhyme or reason. It was not worse now, but different. He had been too busy to perform an in-depth medical examination, but he doubted it would yield anything substantial given how he hadn't learned much from studying the ailment before.

His eyes roved over the pendant of one of the four people inside, seeing an odd shading on the amulet before that faded away under his focus. Strange. Perhaps he could devise some method of taking advantage of that, some kind of divination layer overlaid with the ocular enchantment—

"You've returned," Mattheus said, making Clark blink and file that thought for further study. Ah yes, the council, the people he'd need to talk into repopulating the conservatory. Mattheus was the de facto leader of the settlement, though he refused the title of a mayor. Next to him were Amadeus, the librarian who commanded some respect; the militia captain Alexander; and lastly the local doctor, Gwyneth.

Clark nodded in acknowledgment and made his way to the table where they were seated. "I come bearing news, and regrettably few of them good," he said, pulling out a sheaf of papers. They still thought he was an epidomologist—not a lie, really, but his true specialty lay elsewhere—and he'd need to act the part. "Firstly, we made a small detour to Southchapel, and found none there alive." He held a meaningful pause, mostly for his own enjoyment. "But not all of them dead."

He browsed through the sheaf of papers, well aware what he was looking for but taking a few seconds longer than necessary in order to prompt a response.

"You mean...?" Mattheus asked, not quite sure of the implications. Clark saw the doctor set her jaw from the corner of his eye, and he quickly glanced over to make sure that hadn't been just the shadows again.

"The undead, yes," Clark said and pulled out a sketch of one of the cadavers, with large illustrations of the worms next to it. The doctor swore under her breath, and Amadeus gripped the desk white-knuckled. "The compound had been sealed from the outside by one of the last survivors, whose remains we managed to find. We attempted to purge the infection from there, but regrettably the horde awoke and we were forced to re-seal the doors and break the opening mechanism. Luckily, the building is in good condition and impregnable by the mindless undead, so the chance of the infection spreading due to wandering adventurers—who would need to be dim enough to ignore the blatant warning we left—is very low."

"You fought them?" the captain asked, measuring Clark, as if trying to see worms on him.

Clark nodded towards the door he had come from. "Caliban is an expert on pyrotechnics and the cadavers lay dormant unless disturbed, so controlled extermination is child's play as long as they are not stirred en masse. The infection is fast-acting and rather obvious, so unaware carriers are also not a security issue."

"But the zombies, they..." the doctor trailed off, looking at the others.

"Are endemic," Clark finished, correcting his posture. "We had encountered several instances of lingering infected before coming here, but I had hoped that those would've been related outliers. This, though, paints a much grimmer picture." He tapped the sketch on the table. "They are very long-lasting, so I'm afraid that I have no other option but to conclude that the resettling of Shaobrith is unsafe and the quarantine, insufficient."

He had expected a more animated reaction, but instead only a quiet dread fell over the room, the four of them considering the implications.

"So..." the doctor said after a moment, gesturing to the direction of the town square. "You are saying we should just—just leave?"

Clark shook his head with a grimace. "I cannot say. Thus far the major population centers have been surviving well, yours included, and the infected instances have all been contained. It's difficult to estimate the likelihood of an outbreak with so few data points, but high walls such as these should be an effective deterrent as long as not one infected specimen is allowed entry. And..."

He paused, thinking his words carefully. He didn't want to give them undue hope, but at the same time, a cure was a goal he deemed realistic. "Well, there is always the possibility of a cure being discovered, which I do not believe it impossible. The zombies themselves are not more dangerous than the rest of the wildlife found here if you ignore the high lethality of the infection itself, so mass inoculation should reduce the undead to a manageable nuisance. Regardless, I can only give you my recommendation to leave, but given how I don't intend to do so myself, I can hardly press the issue."

"Aleshara needs us," Mattheus said, tone making it clear that there would be no brooking arguments. The militia captain turned towards him, but some nonverbal signal made him stand down. He was more right than he could've thought.

"Yes," the doctor said, nodding gravely. "And this cure you speak of... You were researching that?"

Clark spread the papers more on the table, pointing at several tables of numbers regarding the zombie activity. "I've only done groundwork so far and I can make no promises, but nothing I have seen indicates that a cure would be an impossibility. I have many avenues of research open, so the primary concern right now is evaluating which approach is most likely to bear fruit. A silver lining, however bleak, is that now at least I can give you a rudimentary protocol for dealing with the infected." He took another paper, this one of higher quality and with clear text inked onto it. "The sole infection vector are the worms, and as long as they are unable to burrow into your body, even handling them is safe—though obviously inadvisable, as they are far more dexterous than a comparable mundane insect would be. This does make containment significantly easier, as we'd be all dead already if it was microbial in nature. Additionally, the worms are very averse of light and high temperatures, so torches and bonfires can provide a temporary barrier if need be."

He put the paper down, following down the list of bullet points with his finger. "Should the worms be encountered in the wild, I can only recommend immediate disengagement and, if available, liberal application of firepower from distance. The extremely swift incubation period of the disease is partly a blessing, as any suspected individuals can be quarantined and their health determined within a matter of hours, simply based on whether or not they become mindless undead after that time. Preferably using some system which would allow for easy immolation if the infection is confirmed. And lastly, while I currently lack the means to test the claim, I believe that high-level restoration spells should be capable of excising the infection should that be available, as most spells relying on divine and natural forces simply override most physical issues that come with mundane medicine. If you don't happen to have highly attuned clerics or druids around, though, the only curative process I can imagine is violent and immediate debridement of all infected tissue." He continued quickly before the doctor could respond, "Which is not feasible. The immense trauma an invasive and rough surgery like that would likely just kill the patient even with constant application magical healing, but more importantly the worms are just too virulent to be handled closely like that. Attempting to save a life in such a way would likely just result in dead healers."

The four people in front of him digested that for a while until the doctor spoke up. "I suppose a silver bullet would've been too much to ask for. This surgery you speak of... How unfeasible is it?"

"Very. If there was a way of providing immunity to the surgeon and assistants, then I suppose it could be worth trying. Perhaps a cleric of a specific domain could confer protection from the worms, but that's another requirement added to the already long list of things which need to happen within ten seconds of infection for the operation to be successful. But should that be available..." Clark deliberated for a second, remembering how the worm had infested the rat he was currently studying, "I'd say it would be plausible. But if, and only if, the response was immediate and ruthless. There would also be no time to anesthetize the patient, so it would be a graphic event to go through, even if successful."

The captain spat to the side. "Bloody great, isn't it."

Clark smiled mirthlessly. They probably wouldn't be happy to hear that their god had been dead for several centuries, now. "My bad news aren't limited to just that," he said, bunching up the medical papers. "We did enter Aleshara afterwards, and found it in shambles."

That provoked a reaction, more than the plague had. It told him much about the culture of the town that even the doctor gasped and leaned forward, eyes wide.

"Shambles? What happened there?" the mayor asked, also leaning forward.

Clark pulled out another sheaf of papers, this one with a picture of one of the ghostly custodians he had encountered in the complex. "I cannot say. Everyone present was dull to the point of catatonia. It was a miracle that the custodians could even keep them alive like that. I can't say what happened there, as it certainly doesn't resemble any illness I know of, but..." he sighed, rolling his eyes, "I can't help but speculate. There were rather intense wards around the complex, partially shutting it out of this plane, so perhaps long-term exposure to that kind of isolation ruined their minds."

Even the captain looked mortified, swallowing hard. These people had dedicated their lives to looking up to the scholars of Aleshara, who now turned out to be little sharper than the cabbages keeping them alive.

"And... can they be cured?" the doctor said, looking up to him.

It was strange to have people look up to him like that. He was an expert in many fields, but the overbearing presence of the Archive kept him painfully aware of just how much he didn't know. It seemed that every corner of his research led to him needing to read up on more and more esoteric subjects in an attempt to piece together something coherent, so it was a weird feeling to have people treat him as the ultimate authority on something. Especially now that he had just ran into a hard limit of the Archive with the name of Talath.

"I don't know." And, despite everything, that admission did still hurt. "I'm not a psychiatrist, and while I do have quite a bit of experience in dimensional matters, I don't know how much of that can be applied to human medicine. The effect seems permanent as far as I can tell."

They looked at him, almost hurt. Well, he did come here with at least some good news. "I did manage to assume the administrative position here, though. We conducted a ritual which transferred the rights to me, and I revised some of the protocols. The doors are now open to a password, the hard dimensional bubble is no longer in place, and the rest of the command structure there was given more authority. Though, with all occupants vegetative, there is nobody there to continue the name of Aleshara."

He stopped there, looking over the rest. The doctor was puzzling over something, probably the illness, the librarian was frowning, and—there, the captain caught on.

"Are you suggesting...?" he said, almost incredulous. The mayor turned to him, then back to Clark, mouth open.

Clark smiled. "Someone needs to keep the lights of civilization on, even in a godsforsaken corner of the world like this. I need volunteers to repopulate Aleshara and make it _something_ again."

"How?" the librarian blurted, so suddenly she seemed surprised herself.

Clark spread his hands. "It is self-sufficient, and it has an extensive archive of literature in it. I can't oversee everything myself, as I have pressing matters to tend to, but I assume that you people can figure out a way of making things run again. The door is open to you. I'm happy to give instructions and guidelines for managing everything, but I trust that you can act independently as long as you just keep the central tenet of knowledge in mind." He leaned forward, seeing the false shadows flicker in the corners of the room more aggressively. "It's meant to be understood. Not hoarded and forgotten, but allowed to be read and comprehended. Spread far and wide to anyone with the wits and will to learn. And what better place to start than yourselves?" He took a step back, spreading his arms. "Anyone can be a scholar if they just are willing to learn."

He could see the change in their postures. These people almost worshipped people they thought were educated, which was the reason why Clark could get an audience with them with such ease. Promising them to _be_ the educated... Well, it was a forgone conclusion.

"We would be honored," the mayor said, the others joining in agreement.

Clark smiled and leaned forward on the table, pushing over a paper where he had prepared some notes about how to run an academy like that.

Academy? Well, suppose it was one, now. Perhaps one with no great difference between the teachers and the pupils, but it was a start.


	16. Burn them as they come.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A close call with the zombies results in some uncomfortable deductions.

Clark spoke suddenly, breaking the tired, damp gloom of a morning come far too early. "The more I think of what happened last night, the more disconcerting it is."

Harbek only grunted from his seat in the front, not taking his eyes off the road. Solomon was alert as well, scanning the treeline, posture straight but eyes bloodshot from fatigue. Caliban was lying down on the roof of the cart, snoozing despite the bumpy ride, but he did acknowledge the words by flicking his ankle in Clark's direction.

"Do tell," Solomon said after the silence had dragged on long enough. The dryad had managed to charm him on its last legs, and mental manipulation like that tended to linger uncomfortably.

Clark closed his notebook and flipped it in his hands a few times, opening it again and bringing up a page where he had sketched different curative approaches to the plague, many of the entries crossed over as dead ends. He had hoped that pyrotherapy could be the easy key to excising the worms due to their sensitivity to warmth, taking a page from an old hedge witch cure to syphilis by almost killing the patient with fever, but the worms had proven too resilient for just that.

He shook himself from those thoughts, drumming his fingers on the illustration of a worm in the corner of the page. "The plague's ability to infect dryads is an unfortunate development. I had hoped, if not expected, that entities like that would have been immune to the plague, but that wasn't the case. If dryads are at risk, what else can these things infect?" He sighed, briefly imagining the nightmare of having just regular trees teeming with worms, ready to launch at any unaware passerby.

"Anything that moves, probably," Solomon grumbled. Not entirely incorrect, Clark thought.

"The zombies are dumb. We can manage those, even en masse." He unconsciously flipped forward on his book to a few drafts of anti-undead traps, fire and spikes. "We can manipulate and outmaneuver them. We can distract them and use tactics that would be blatant to any intelligent foe. You just saw how well that worked in Tihili. But this..." he paused, playing the encounter back in his head. _'This island needs no cure,'_ the dryad had said, speaking naturally as any elf would. "It spoke. It reasoned, and it saw through my bluff."

"Bluff?" Caliban asked, tilting his hood slightly to look at Clark.

Clark just waved his hand. "I tried to tell it that we were attempting to infect Iral, after it became apparent what it wanted. But that's the gist, isn't it. It wanted things. The zombies—they don't." He ran his hand through his hair, realizing absent-mindedly that the unkept mop hadn't seemed to have grown longer in the last month. "And that is... terrifying. It used tactics. It sought us out, talked to us, and sicced those quicklings on us. It tried to trap Solomon, and when threatened, attempted to teleport away. The zombies shouldn't have that kind of intellect, but if they can..." He let the thought linger in the air.

"Never a dull day with you lot," Harbek said from the front. Caliban smirked and Solomon patted Harbek's shoulder, but the joke hit a bit too close to home to lighten the mood.

"Well," Solomon said, clearly trying to scrape together a silver lining. "This was marked as an off-limits area. Maybe it's a local thing."

Clark grimaced. "I feel like we've exhausted our optimism. We were optimistic about the manor being just a fluke, too. And this... so what if it's just a one in a thousand thing? What if there are other smart zombies out there, who don't just act on instinct and actively attempt to spread the infection? Even if it's just specific creatures that can retain their will, we've been here for barely a day and already encountered one. They can't be rare, and if the infection has grown to be a part of the forest itself, how is it ever going to be contained?"

He shook his head. Too many moving parts. "That cemented my belief that a cure to it has to be our priority. It's grown too dangerous if we want to keep operating on this island. At the very least we need some method of immunization. Caliban there—" he flicked a stray pine needle in his direction "—can just sweat them off by the virtue of having eaten up a dead phoenix, but the rest of us don't have that sort of luxury. The Blood Moon is... extant." He held a short pause, reminding himself of yet another thing that had to be dealt with. "But right now I strongly feel that we must prioritize finding some way of mitigating the infection. We can't just keep hoping that we won't get unlucky."

Solomon grunted in agreement, briefly taking his eyes off the side of the road. "And how's that going? The cure, I mean."

"Slowly," Clark said, looking down at his notebook and seeing a table of calculations regarding the worms' response to different magical charges. "But that brings me to another thing that must be discussed."

He needed a live specimen to study. Or, an un-live one, as it was. The infested rat bottled in the depths of the cart had been invaluable for his research. How else was he supposed to test anything if he didn't know how the actual infection would respond? It was the only lead he had that kept him on track, and even the dead ends narrowed the search considerably.

"When we retrieved this cart from Tihili, the rat was highly animated. We were making noise and trying to purposefully stir the horde elsewhere, so I didn't think much of it, but again I'm starting to question what good is optimism for. Maybe it was just reacting to the loud noises, but at the same time, this cart rarely sees a quiet day." Clark fiddled with the pages of his notebook, trying to figure a way to present his case. "And the first thing the dryad said to me when I greeted it was _'What do you have in that cart of yours?'"_ He exhaled slowly. "It could sense the rat."

There was a pregnant silence in the cart. Mustard Veil's occasional gruff oinks from the front filled the pause as it struggled to pull the wagon through the overgrown road, and with the pale sunshine filtering through the autumn foliage, the situation would've been close to idyllic if it weren't for the looming threat of an undead pandemic.

"Alright, then," Solomon said after a while. He had been the one in the end to choose to bottle the worm in the first place, going directly against Lucan's orders to burn the thing. They agreed that a cure had to be found, but Clark doubted Solomon was willing to go quite as far with it as he was.

"I need a sample to study if I'm ever going to find any way of dealing with the infection. We haven't seen the regular zombies react to the presence of the cart yet, and I'm not sure how much one rat even can draw them, but, well." He drummed his fingers on the notebook, feeling the weight of the magic in it tingle against his fingertips. "I just told you how I feel about optimism. The dryad found us once, so future encounters can't be too unlikely."

"Just burn them as they come," Caliban said from his bedroll, crossing his legs. "Rotting tree is kindling just like any other, isn't it?"

Clark looked at him, eyes drawn to the singed edges of his sleeves. A pyrokinetic was really a blessing during times like these, especially one with no compunctions about collateral damage when need be. "I suppose. We should hurry. Iral is safe, once we find a way in. I might have to figure out an accommodation for the specimen there, perhaps in the outskirts, but we'll see when we get there."


	17. Sight Unfettered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stranded in Feywild, Clark starts realizing that he's witnessed more than he thought.

Clark grunted in frustration, scrawling a jagged X on the parchment he had been writing on when the numbers didn't add up. He kept his eyes closed, trying to let his breaths even out. That proved difficult because the ever-present feeling of just slight _wrongness_ permeated everything. The scents, the smells, the whiffs of magic he caught, even the passage of time itself were just skewed in Feywild.

It didn't make any sense. There were treatises written which touched upon the topic of transdimensional temporal differentials, so it was hardly unprecedented. Time did not pass in the Archive, for example, which was also the reason why his internal clock was infallibly precise, as the timeless connection gave him a "zero point" to work off of, so to speak. It was usually steady as the noon itself, but now as he tried to plot out where the time dilation factor lay, putting the numbers on the paper resulted in fluctuating answers. Not only was Feywild temporally asynchronous with the material plane at large, but this city had also some other enchantment to it which further muddled the situation. How long had passed in the real world was anyone's guess.

Anything more than a day or two would mean that Harbek had to leave, left alone with Mustard Veil in the middle of an infested forest.

Anything more than a week would worsen their case with their status as purported outlaws, as their silence would be damning.

Anything more than a year would have their estates probably dissolved.

Anything more than a decade...

Clark sighed, leaning on the table heavily and feeling how each alien second ticked forth. Norrell was stranded, now, with the canker only kept in check by the seal Clark had made what felt like so long ago. He could still remember the scene with crystal clarity, bumbling with the mana graphing and barely even grasping what he was doing. He shook his head with a mirthless smile. Amateur work. If only he could do that again.

He opened his eyes, glancing at the corner of the room where something colorful had flickered. That, too, was a problem. Not only was the question if he'd ever see his brother again looming on his mind, he was beginning to worry if he'd see anything at all in short order.

The shadows in the periphery he had gotten used to in the material world. They were distracting but manageable, but as they had crossed over here, it had gotten worse. The apparitions were more numerous and intrusive, sometimes sticking over objects and people, forcing him to blink to even recognize faces.

The semiotic enchantment on his eyes had proven supremely useful, as it let him dive headfirst into any book without needing to bother with translators. Instead of making him see just ink on paper, the magic brought to fore something deeper, showing him the meaning behind the words, the lingering imprint of a conscious mind writing the text. Perhaps he should have been concerned after his resurrection that something was wrong as his body had... he didn't even know what had happened to it, but some kind of partial transcendence had taken place. Maybe that had exposed the enchantment to something it couldn't process.

Or maybe it was just the sheer amount of arcane power he had channeled through his body. Not all of it just benign, he thought, remembering the rush of shadowy power as he unleashing the full power of the Archive deep in the bowels of Aleshara. Maybe crossing over a faulty portal had been the final straw, and something in the spell had cracked, and was now leaking all over the place.

Self-diagnosis was certainly difficult. He couldn't exactly see his own eyes, and he most certainly did not trust anyone in this xenophobic dump to take a prod at his eyes which were currently leaking magic all over the place. He closed his eyes again, massaging his temples and sinking into his memories. He could remember the erratic patterns of the shadows that had appeared after his resurrection. Nothing he could put on paper, as it was far too chaotic for any kind of syntactical representation, so he'd have to make do. Fluttering near the edges of his vision, the shadow of Caliban's hood stretching and undulating when he did not look, the shade of a branch splitting in two until he looked at it.

The shapes growing more chaotic as time went on, very subtly at first. They became agitated in battle, following his mental state and roiling as he drew from the Archive and forced its dissonant power on the minds of others. They grew to a maelstrom as he finished the ancient ritual at the heart of Aleshara, the full brunt of the power of the Archive coursing through him and whipping them into a frenzy.

Why did they change? What did they respond to? He frowned, wracking his mind for the details. If only he could see _more_.

They flitted around his vision. One clinging to the pendant of the doctor of the village. The dizzying swirl as they went through the teleportation circle, the uneasy sliding as their group hurried through the forbidden forest, the shadows elongating on the way.

Could that be a coincidence? Just them accidentally aligning with the planar portal? Or was that just something he was imagining entirely. If only he could remember going through the portal itself. He had stopped breathing, having forgotten that reflex entirely as he strained his memory. There was the cave they walked through, slowly and carefully. Caliban sighing. Solomon's grip on his sword shifting, the imperceptible hum of his moonsword turning. The shadows warped, almost like a tunnel, and... and...

He opened his eyes, staring at the wall.

They had reacted. The shadows weren't just the result of his perception losing synchronicity with reality. They weren't corporeal, but they were _real._

He turned, seeing the flitting shadows cling to things, but this time with a purpose. It was like he was looking at an optical illusion which suddenly clicked into place.

The enchantment in his eyes was on its last legs, he could feel it. It simply was not meant to withstand thaumic stresses like that, having its sensitive interfacing subjected to round-the clock use, regular and intense gradient waves, high-energy dimensional travel and glimpses of what lay beyond the veil of mere mortality.

It had served him well, but it was but a shackle for him now. With little hesitation, he nudged a string of magic against the runic arrays holding the enchantment to his eyes, and the magic unraveled without a sound, filling his vision with popping static.

He blinked as the buzz died down, and he could finally _see._ Untainted by having everything forced through a filter on his eyes, the shadows were now far more than just flitting fragments of something vague; they were the magic of the world itself thrumming through the entirety of creation. And here in Feywild, it was a riot of activity. Thick fog of the city-wide enchantment permeating its space, strings and eddy currents of lesser magics riding on top of it. He turned his head, mesmerized. The bronze plates of his robe were dazzling with recursive hair fractures, some ancient magic roiling into itself. The lamp in the ceiling had a greenish tint to it, belying the magical charge keeping it alight. His familiar, a bat hanging from the rafters pretending to be asleep, was a tight knot of overwritten symbols, a pattern of pure magic dense enough to be given a form.

The more he looked, the more he saw, and without the fetters in his eyes, understanding dawned to him like it hadn't done in ages. The patterns near the portal right before losing consciousness had been muddied by the failing enchantment, but now he knew what to look for, he could see that they had been following some kind of structure, an anchor point mirroring another on the other plane. And...

He sprang into action, mind working faster than he could even keep track of, one revelation leading to next as he scrambled for parchment and quill. That anchor was something he could emulate temporarily, and—

He stopped, pen gouging a line through the parchment. That was something he had already been doing almost daily. When using Message, he was making a pinprick connection to connect to the mind of another person. So if he simply inserted a dimensional anchor into the spell, far more powerful than necessary for conversing with someone close by...

He turned the paper around, drawing a circle and coloring it in with sharp radials, making educated guesses to mimic the shapes of power that he had seen made up the portal. It was hasty and experimental, but in his mind' eye he could see the circuit working as subtle strands of ambient magic oozed into the diagram, like water to an irrigation system. The shape complete, he cast his Message, feeding it into the paper and forcing through all the magic he could, filling it to the brim and making the structure pop like a cork, the circle burning out of the paper as his thoughts were Sent through it.

_"Norrell?"_ was all he could muster to send.

_"...Clark?"_ came a reply after a second. Only one word but filled with nuance and complexity; confusion, surprise, shock. Hope.

Clark choked, fisting the burnt scrap of paper and reaching for another, pen hand shaking.


End file.
